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This paper discusses a number of tensions apparent in the development of a globalized account of literary practices and frames these within the context of 20th-century postcolonial transitions, a phase in which the literary decisions of authors working in various dominated contexts can be seen as especially subjected to collective considerations but one in which the utopian dimension of an adhesion to literary beliefs is itself revealed as a critical component of literariness. In discussing the deliberately contrasted examples of Léopold Sédar Senghor and Máirtín Ó Cadhain, the intention is to outline two particularly important choices (of language and of genre) in that context, paying particular attention to the inseparably individual and collective character of these choices.