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This volume explores the state of literary theory today, decades after the repeatedly proclaimed end of theory. It builds on the idea that theory is historically constituted as it is “always becoming something else” as Leslie Fiedler claimed in the 1950s, arguing that the historical constitution of theory relies on theory’s procedural nature. In order to assess theory’s procedural challenge to the fundamental notions that all the disciplines within an episteme have brought to the fore, it addresses these questions: What are the procedures theory has relied on? Are they a secret to its resistance, or is resistance its primary procedure? And if so, a resistance to what? Secondly, if resistance were theory’s principal vehicle, at which point does resistance, conceptualized only procedurally (as resisting something, questioning anything, criticizing whatever), display hallmarks of a disciplinary closure that must call for new resistances, and perhapsfor a fundamentally another kind? The book turns to what theory does in order to avoid a partial answer to what theory is.
Philosophy, Society and the Cunning of History in Eastern Europe charts the intellectual landscape of twentieth century East-Central Europe under the unifying theme of 'precariousness' as a mode of historical existence. Caught between empires, often marked by catastrophic historic events and grand political failures, the countries of East-Central Europe have for a long time developed a certain intellectual self-representation, a culture that not only helps them make some sense of such misfortunes, but also protects them somehow from a collapse into nihilism. An interdisciplinary study of this sophisticated culture of survival and endurance has been long overdue. Not only is it charming and w...
Recent developments within and beyond Europe have variously challenged the very idea of Europe, calling it into question and demanding reconsideration of its underlying assumptions. The essays collected here reassess the contemporary position of a perceived “European” identity in the world, overshadowed as it is by the long antecedents and current crisis of triumphalist Eurocentrism. While Eurocentrism itself is still a potent mind-set, it is now increasingly challenged by intra-European crises and by the emergence of autonomously non-European perceptions of Europe. The perspectives assembled here come from the fields of political, cultural and literary history, contemporary history, social and political science and philosophy. Contributors are: Damir Arsenijević, Luiza Bialasiewicz, Vladimir Biti, Lucia Boldrini, Gerard Delanty, César Domínguez, Nikol Dziub, Rodolphe Gasché, Aage Hansen-Löve, Shigemi Inaga, Joep Leerssen, and Vivian Liska.
Memory in the Balkans has often been described as binding, authoritative, and non-negotiable, functioning as a banner of war. This book challenges such a one-dimensional representation and offers a more nuanced analysis that accommodates frequently ignored instances of transnational solidarity, dialogue, communal mourning and working through a difficult past. Exploring a broad range of memorial practices, the book focuses on the ways in which cultural memory is mediated, performed and critically reworked by literature and the arts in the former Yugoslavia. Against the methodological nationalism of works that study Serbian, Croatian, or Bosniak culture as self-contained, this book examines po...
Comparative Literature: Sharing Knowledges for Preserving Cultural Diversity theme is a component of Encyclopedia of Social Sciences and Humanities in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. The Theme on Comparative Literature: Sharing Knowledge's for Preserving Cultural Diversity provides six different topics: 1. Language, literature and human sustainability; 2. Relationships among literature and other artistic activities and discourses ; 3. Comparative literature and other fields of knowledge; 4. Comparative literature, criticism and media ; 5. Comparative literature in the age of global change; 6. Translatio studii and cross-cultural movements or Weltverkehr. These three volumes are aimed at a wide spectrum of audiences: University and College Students, Educators and Research Personnel.
Bringing together the analyses of the literary world-system, translation studies, and the research of European cultural nationalism, this book contests the view that texts can be attributed global importance irrespective of their origin, language, and position in the international book market. Focusing on Slovenian literature, almost unknown to world literature studies, this book addresses world literature’s canonical function in the nineteenth-century process of establishing European letters as national literatures. Aware of their dependence on imperial powers, (semi)peripheral national movements sought international recognition through, among other things, the newly invented figure of the national poet. Writers central to dependent national communities were canonized to represent their respective cultures to the norm-giving Other – the emerging world literary canon and its aesthetic ideology. Hence, national literatures asserted their linguo-cultural individuality through the process of worlding; that is, by their positioning in the international literary world informed by the supposed universality of the aesthetic.
The goal of this book is to elaborate the theoretical framework with regard to reading postmodern fiction from the perspective of the bodies of their narrators as textual occurrences. It centers on Lacanian psychoanalysis and the intersection between its various political interpretations and feminist theories. The emphasis is on the register of the real, on the domain of trauma as it appears in contemporary world, literature and history and on attempts at artistic resolution of its consequences. Since postmodernism is widely interpreted as a Western phenomenon, the book tries to show its dependence on much broader spatial, political, cultural and ideological dimensions, taking as index the d...
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