The paper proposes an introduction of the methodology of literary studies into memory studies. Habitually, traditional disciplines such as literary studies tend to adapt to intersectional, interdisciplinary fields such as memory studies, borrowing concepts and theories, and this is why my proposal may seem unusual but, I believe, highly profitable. I will rely on the concept of genre in its more recent developments (Moretti 2006, Dimock 2010) and on the reinterpretation of comparative literature as world literature (Damrosch 2005, Moraru 2015). I will use this conceptual background to investigate a major category of the contemporary novel which surfaced on four continents in the last four decades, usually in posttotalitarian countries, namely the novel of memory. This brand of novel is featured widely in Europe (with Spain, Germany and several East-Central European countries among which Romania), North America with the United States, Latin America (for instance in Argentina), and Africa (where practically all postcolonial literature is also interpreted as a literature of memory). The question to be asked is whether this spread and diversity is due to a shared perspective of various academics which leads to borrowing the same concept for different literary realities, or whether we should truly speak of a "world genre" in all the novel of memory's scattered embodiments. But what is a world genre? Firstly, a world genre is a genre with a more or less global reach, thereby overwhelming the differences between its national, local or regional realizations. Secondly, a world genre is a "worlded" genre, which means it wields a planetary kind of imagination, transcending the local one. Thirdly, the world genre is a migrating genre, visiting sites of contamination, circulation and reinterpretation of themes, motifs, techniques and influences assimilated through reading in the original and in translations, etc. I call upon Anderson 1991 and his "spectral comparativism" to investigate the case study of Romania's post-Ceausescu and Spain's post-Franco literature. The convergence between the Romanian and the Spanish novel of memory, written respectively in the 2000s and in the 1980s, needs to be assessed in relation with either a similar pattern of historical experience (both countries were posttotalitarian at the time), or a common literary model or influence, which came to be adapted in similar versions at the two margins of the European continent.
