Galin Tihanov

Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?)

At the outset of the twenty-first century, we seem at last positioned to recognize and admit the demise of literary theory as a distinct discipline of scholarship. Even the most dedicated proponents of theory are busy spelling out the dimensions of its irremediable crisis.1 In retrospect, one can locate literary theory within a period of some eighty years, from its inception in the late 1910s until perhaps the early 1990s. The beginnings of the discipline were marked by the activities of the Russian Formalists. Wolfgang Iser’s turn in the late 1980s from reception theory and phenomenology of reading to what he called “literary anthropology” presaged the end of literary theory per se, and the death of Yuri Lotman in 1993 confirmed it. Lotman had in any case come gradually to embrace semiotics as a global theory of culture rather than a narrowly conceived theory of literature.2 The earlier chronological boundary is by now commonly recognized: the

On the Significance of Historical Poetics: In Lieu of a Foreword

This invited foreword to a cluster of four essays on historical poetics seeks to establish how the relevance of Historical Poetics is reclaimed today. Affinities, differences, and questions of commensurability and historical contextualization are raised as part of the discussion. The foreword also attempts to resituate Historical Poetics within current debates on “world literature.” In this light it reconsiders the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, suggesting that he performed a flight away from the largely Eurocentric tenor of the Russian Formalists.

The Location of World Literature

How we actually understand world literature, as an attestable reality of texts or as a prism - one might even be tempted to add a unit - of comparison, in other words, a mode of reading, is not a metaphysical issue. It has very real implications for the ways in which we approach questions such as how one should try to narrate the history of world literature. In addition to this fundamental differentiation, I also wish to suggest another, more concrete grid that should assist in this effort of locating world literature as a construct.... One needs to be aware of at least four major reference points: time, space, language, and, crucially, what one could term self-reflexivity - how literature itself reflects on, and creates images of, world literature, thus opening up spaces for interrogation and dissent from the currently prevalent notions of world literature.

Continuities in the Soviet Period

Intellectual history presents a bundle of continuities and discontinuities enacted, sometimes simultaneously, within cultures that evolve over time. In this essay I focus on the continuities that permeate – often hidden behind dramatic political changes – the scene of philosophy and social thought in the Soviet period, from the October Revolution in 1917 to the demise of the USSR in 1991. Limitations of space mean that difficult decisions have had to be made as to what ought to be included and what could be left out. Since the dominant intellectual paradigm of the period was Marxism, it was beyond doubt that any serious engagement with the question of continuity must not simply address Marxism but should actually put it right at the centre of attention. Ignoring Marxism and preferring instead to explore solely various non-Marxist discourses would have resulted in a failure to grasp the crucial place of Marxism in the often subterraneous dynamics of stability and change which sustained and shot through the public discourses of philosophy and the social sciences in the Soviet period. With reference to Marxism, the continuity inscribed in this dialectic of permanence and transformation had two important aspects: the self-awareness and positioning of Soviet Marxism vis-à-vis western non-Marxist philosophy, and through this, but also independently of it, vis-à-vis pre-1917Russian thought. The second part of the essay examines various discourses of exceptionalism, concentrating on the revival of Slavophilism, pochvennichestvo (a current of thought that crystallised in the 1860s and displayed some affinities with Slavophilism but was more unambiguously conservative and at times also anti-Semitic) and Eurasianism. The emphasis here is deliberately on developments in the Soviet Union. I have elected not to include a separate overview of émigré currents of thought, because this would have reproduced the wrong notion of Russian émigré intellectuals as being the only heirs to the pre-1917 tradition, thus also reinforcing the long-maintained – and rather misleading – picture of a constant and unbridgeable chasm between Soviet and émigré intellectual life. The diaspora and the mainland were involved in

Menschendämmerung: Karl Marx, Ernst Jünger und der Untergang des Selbst@@@'Wann hat dieser Scheißkrieg ein Ende?' Writing and Rewriting the First World War

In one of the most controversial scholarly works published in Sweden during the last couple of years, Johan Tralau shows the relevance of alienation as a problem for political philosophy. In modernity, a conception of utopia has been influential in which there is supposed to be no alienation in relation to nature, technology or other people. In contradistinction to the traditional interpretation of the young Karl Marx, Tralau shows that the attempt to do away with alienation entails the dissolution of the individual. In that respect, this utopia can be compared to the totalitarian Worker’s state depicted by the young Ernst Junger. Tralau argues that Junger’s vision of the future contains a secret nihilist doctrine according to which his own utopia is an illusion, i. e., a mythological fiction that is supposed to enable man to escape from the alienation inherent in the modern world. On the basis of these destructive historical attempts at liberation from alienation, Tralau expounds an anti-utopian defence of the alienated condition, arguing that alienation is a prerequisite of liberty.

“Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East)

Abstract Hitherto unknown archival material allows a closer look at Carl Schmitt as a theorist of culture and tragedy, and a fuller examination of Heiner Müllers interest in, and debt to, him. The significance of Schmitts theory of drama for Heiner Müllers Hamletmachine is analyzed against the comparative background of Russian literary Hamletism. Müllers self-conscious intertextualism was a response to, and an extension of, Schmitts critique of the role of artistic imagination in drama, which is treated here as but an element of his wider post-romantic cultural and social theory.

Introduction: Appropriation in History

For a very long time, Bakhtin Studies have been informed by a holistic approach, which in the nearly 20 years since its inauguration by Tzvetan Todorov’s Mikhail Bakhtine: le principe dialogique (1981) yielded a number of biographies, expositions and anthologies of, as well as introductions into, Bakhtin’s writings. Simultaneously, there has been a strong trend of interpreting Bakhtin from the agenda of group rights, gender studies and post-colonial theory. A third persistent line has been the use of the Circle’s writings for the purposes of analysing literary texts; this is the principal way in which Bakhtin has been turned into a constant presence in the seminar and classrooms of European and American universities.