As part of the PEN American Center’s New York Festival of International Literature, a panel Thursday at the New School University wrestled with the limits of nationalist definitions of literature. “The Post-National Writer” was co-sponsored by the internationales literaturfestival berlin.

Yuri Rytkheu, whose novels and stories are about the Chukotka of Siberia, opened by noticing he was sitting at the far end of the table: If you compare the table to a team of sled dogs, he said, he would either be the lead dog or the one that brings up the rear. In terms of the historical length of national written literature, he said, as a writer from the Arctic Circle, he was probably bringing up the rear. The literature of his people, he said, was the same age as he was.

Lillian Faschinger spoke next. She was born in Vienna and has been a writer in residence at Dartmouth and at Deutsches Haus at New York University. The audience laughed when she read remarks that began, “Basically, I returned to Austria only for its pastry.”

“I’m definitely post-something,” said Salman Rushdie, who opened by saying that, earlier in the week, he had lunch with Arab writers and they all agreed they didn’t like the prefix “post-” as in “post-colonial” and “post-modern.” Instead, “we like the term “trans-.”

Mr. Rushdie said whole new academic departments could be set up with the terms “trans-colonial,” “trans-modern,” and so forth. One audience member shouted out that there already were such designated departments. Francisco Goldman later said “trans-fat” was a more popular idea in America than “post-colonial” and so forth.

Mr. Rushdie read from his collection “Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction, 1992-2002” (Modern Library), which described the PEN Congress in New York in 1986, at which prominent writers discussed the topic of “The Imagination of the Writer and the Imagination of the State.” It was “a subject of Maileresque grandeur, dreamed up, of course, by Norman Mailer.” Mr. Rushdie said there were many ways of reading the word “and” in the title – “for many of us, it meant ‘versus.'”

In the context of man versus state, Mr. Rushdie brought up a remark by Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kis, who lived for many years in France. While people tell jokes, Kis had suggested the state also had a sense of humor. Kis had then proceeded to offer an example of a “joke” by the state: “A letter, received by him in Paris, posted in what was then still Yugoslavia. Inside the sealed envelope, stamped on the first page, were the words ‘This letter has not been censored.'”

Saying he felt a bit like the lazy middle dog on the sled, poet and translator Eliot Weinberger spoke next. He said that the recent death of Saul Bellow was a sad reminder of that writer’s “unfortunate defense of Western Civilization: ‘Where is the Zulu Tolstoy? Where is the Proust of Papua New Guinea?'” The audience laughed when Mr. Weinberger added in an aside, “Bellow being perfectly fluent in all 700 languages of Papua New Guinea.”

Mr. Weinberger recalled having at that time told a friend, Lydia Davis, that there may or may not be a Papuan Proust, “but there certainly is a Bengali one, Nirad Chaudhuri, author of ‘Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.’ “When many years later, Ms. Davis was commissioned to newly translate Proust’s “Swann’s Way,” she read Chaudhuri and found the author inspirational for her, “not only as a great book itself, but for the way Chaudhuri handled long sentences in a turn-of-the-century diction, which she thought perfect for Proust in English.”

Mr. Weinberger said that literature rarely moves in a straight line. Post-national, like any “‘post-‘ phrase that does not refer to an actual chronology, is essentially meaningless.” While everyone sort of understands these terms, he said, there are various models, each with its own ramifications.

One such model, he said, is the writer born in a former colony, writing in the colonial language, “and now living in the colonial country or another first world country where that language is spoken.” He said much of the liveliest literature written in English and French are written by Caribbean, South Asian, and African writers living in the United Kingdom, America, Canada, or France.

He said such writers face the dilemma of audience in writing about their countries of origin: “For whom are they writing?” He continued, “Should a character in a novel by an Indian writer cook with ghee or clarified butter? If you write ‘ghee,’ the readers in your country of residence will be bewildered; if you write ‘clarified butter,’ the readers in your country of origin will accuse you of toadying to the West.

The second model, he said, is the writer who moves to another country and writes in the language of that country. He pointed out the example of panel member YokoTawada, a German novelist who is Japanese.

Mr. Weinberger described a third model: “the writer who lives abroad, often for political reasons, but continues to write in the mother language.” Mr. Weinberger offered the example of another panelist, Polish-born Adam Zagajewski, who moved to Paris in 1982 and returned to Krakow in 2002.

Mr. Weinberger said, “These writers live a kind of double exile, both from the language of home and the language of their residence,” which can get even more complex when they can’t publish in their native country. He offered the example poet of Bei Dao, who later read that evening at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. “In his first years of exile in northern Europe,” Mr. Weinberger said that Mr. Dao “used to say that he spoke Chinese to the mirror.”

Offering a fourth model, Mr. Weinberger described the Third World writer who lives in and writes about another non-Western country. He mentioned fellow panelist Jose Manuel Prieto, the Havana-born novelist who resides in Mexico City. Mr. Weinberger called this “a kind of horizontal dialogue” that lay beyond old colonialist hierarchies.

Mr. Weinberger ended by describing himself as yet another model: living in Manhattan, where he was born, but publishing essays and political articles abroad in 20 languages, which are “often not published in English at all until they are collected in book form.”

Mr. Weinberger then told an amusing anecdote. He had just come back from Albania, where he was invited to give some readings. There, a leading newspaper featured a full-page article on him – accompanied by a large photo of T.S. Eliot. “I’m not only post-national,” said to audience laughter, “I’m post-personal identity.”