Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. Much of her work focused on the system of institutionalized segregation in place in her home country of South Africa known as Apartheid. Gordimer's writing often revealed the unpleasant truth that this racist system dehumanized and debased not only the majority of black citizens whose lives the white minority controlled but whites as well. A research paper could focus on elements like the ban on Gordimer's works in her home country or the importance of literature as a tool to fight social injustice. Another potential topic is to analyze whether Gordimer's literary importance overshadowed equally talented black writers in a kind of ironic version of artistic Apartheid.
Critics of art, film and television have co-opted the 20th-century literary movement of Postmodernism and applied it so diversely over the past few decades that it is danger of losing its original meaning. A research paper on the true genesis of meaning of postmodernism should begin with French writer/philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard. Lyotard outlines the original epistemology of postmodern thought in his groundbreaking essay "The Postmodern Condition." Other important authors to include in the research include Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida. A research paper on Postmodernism is especially apt because much of later 20th-century world literature adopts at least some its tenets.
The horrors and depth of man's inhumanity to man experienced during World War II produced a movement in world literature known as the Theater of the Absurd. This absurd method of viewing the world does have antecedents tracing back as Greek and Elizabethan drama. The Theater of the Absurd rejects realism, embraces Surrealism and Existentialism and seeks above all else to connect people with communication that does not end with language. Research papers on the Theater of the Absurd can focus on simpler topics like representative writers such as Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco or can take a much more expansive approach such as examining how the form attempts to reintroduce myth and ritual to the stage experience.
Islamic literature offers a very rich source of topics for research papers on World Literature. Like its Western counterpart, ancient Islamic literature originally focused on poetry. Poetic forms included qasida, ghazel and masnavi. Islamic literature also covers philosophy, history and adventure tales. Muslim literature of the latter half of the 20th-century evolved with the displacement of Palestinians and the creation of the nation of Israel.