Galin Tihanov

The Birth and Death of Literary Theory

Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. Juli 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 160mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 567g
• ISBN-13: 9780804785228
• ISBN-10: 0804785228
• Artikelnr.: 53532386

Autorenporträt

Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Prologue: What This Book Is and Is Not About
chapter abstract
The Prologue introduces the reader to the goals of the book and its
methodology. The death of literary theory is discussed, in Derridean sense,
as opening up the much more important question of its multiple legacies.
The precise meaning of "literary theory" is also clarified, in comparison
with recent meta-discourses that draw on "theory" understood, more broadly
and less specifically, as Continental philosophy.
Introduction: The Radical Historicity of Literary Theory
chapter abstract
The chapter explores the birth of literary theory in the years around World
War I through a chronotopic prism: this birth took place at a precise
moment in time and in a precise location - and for good reasons. The
multiple (and overlapping) scenarios that best describe the emergence of
literary theory point to the disintegration and modification of mainstream
philosophical discourses (phenomenology; Marxism); the need to respond to
new experimental developments in literature; exile, polyglossia, and the
productive estrangement from a single (one's own national) language in
which literature is thought. Asserting its radical historicity, one can
observe that literary theory emerged in Eastern and Central Europe in the
interwar decades as one of the conceptual by-products of the transition
from a regime of relevance that recognizes literature for its role in
social and political practice to a regime that values literature primarily
for its qualities as art.
1Russian Formalism: Entanglements at Birth and Later Reverberations
chapter abstract
This chapter is an exploration of the complex relationship between
Formalism and Marxism, and between the different regimes of relevance and
valorization of literature-and their respective argumentative logics-at
work in Formalism and Marxism. To detail this, the chapter offers three
case studies framed by the question of Formalism's impact and its
encounters with intellectual formations that had their own (larger) stake
in the political debates of the time: the 1927 public dispute between
Formalism and Marxism; Viktor Shklovsky's theory of estrangement and its
multiple echoes; and the mediated presence of Formalism in Eurasianism, a
Russian exilic movement that sought to reconcile Formalism and Marxism, as
well as the distinct regimes of relevance within which they operated.
2A Skeptic at the Cradle of Theory: Gustav Shpet's Reflections on
Literature
chapter abstract
This chapter takes the discussion of the different regimes of relevance and
valorization of literature into new territory: it reveals how the more
traditional regime of relevance that insisted on literature's wider social
commitment and significance operated in a milder and more diffuse fashion
in the 1920s as an invitation to interpret literature, not through the
prism of literary theory-which would have entailed an insistence on the
uniqueness of literature grounded in the specific way it uses language-but
rather through the less radical screen of aesthetics and philosophy of art.
Gustav Shpet is very much a thinker who participates in this process, but
his place in it is contradictory and inconclusive: although foreshadowing
some important tenets of Structuralism, he remained in the end poised
between innovation and regression, and his ultimate loyalty tended to be
with a philosophical and aesthetic approach to literature and the arts.
3Toward a Philosophy of Culture: Bakhtin beyond Literary Theory
chapter abstract
During the 1930s, Mikhail Bakhtin arrived at a new way of capturing the
relevance of literature, different from the regimes of relevance that
sustained the work of either the Russian Formalists or Gustav Shpet.
Bakhtin's transition in the 1930s from ethics and aesthetics to philosophy
of culture, analyzed in the first section of this chapter, is crucial for
understanding this new regime. The chapter then proceeds to offer a case
study of Bakhtin's positioning in relation to the 1930s Soviet debates on
the classical and the canon; this prepares the ground for returning to the
question of Bakhtin's impact and later appropriations of his work,
especially through the lens of postmodernism and post-Structuralism.
Ultimately, this chapter seeks to grasp the specific regime of relevance
that sustained the significance of literature in Bakhtin's writings of the
1930s, still centered around the importance of language, but not around
"literariness."
4The Boundaries of Modernity: Semantic Paleontology and Its Subterranean
Impact
chapter abstract
The presence of semantic paleontology in literary studies and its
importance for the methodological debates of the 1930s have never before
been examined systematically. The chapter thus begins by outlining the
foundations of semantic paleontology and its interventions in the study of
literature during the 1930s; the analysis then focuses on the principal
methodological distinctions that semantic paleontology sought to draw in
order to assert its own identity vis-à-vis other trends, especially Russian
Formalism. Attention then turns to the central question: what was the place
of semantic paleontology in the 1930s polemics on how and where one should
draw the boundaries of modernity, and how did this shape the way its
practitioners assigned significance to literature. The final section
explores the impact of semantic paleontology on cultural and literary
theory; this impact persisted into the early 1980s, at times paradoxically
reinforced by the critique semantic paleontology triggered.
5Interwar Exiles: Regimes of Relevance in Émigré Criticism and Theory
chapter abstract
This chapter returns to the importance of exile and discusses literary
theory not per se, but in its interactions with another distinct discourse,
that of literary criticism, which had its own dynamic and its own
conventions. The symbiosis of literary theory and criticism was a palpable
feature of literary life in the diaspora, where the social and professional
makeup of the new intelligentsia encouraged this conversion to a greater
degree. The chapter is thus an examination of the ways in which émigré
literary criticism between the world wars sought to extend an inherited
regime of relevance that would conceive of literature as speaking directly
to the traditional collective concerns of its creators and readers-in
contrast to a radically different perspective that sought to endorse a
regime of relevance in which literature would be denationalized so as to
address the private concerns of the exile.
Epilogue: A Fast-Forward to "World Literature"
chapter abstract
Today the legacy of modern literary theory is not available in a pure and
concentrated fashion; instead, it is dispersed, dissipated, often fittingly
elusive. This inheritance is now performing its work in a climate already
dominated by a different regime of relevance, which it faces directly and
must negotiate. The patrimony of literary theory is currently active within
a regime of relevance that thinks literature through its market and
entertainment value, with only residual recall of its previously highly
treasured autonomy. This regime of relevance has engendered the
interpretative framework of "world literature" that has recently grown and
gained popularity. Looking at Russian literary theory during the interwar
decades, we are struck by the fact that many of its major trends were,
obliquely or more directly, relevant to this new framework of understanding
and valorizing literature in the regime of its global production and
consumption.