Do “Minor Literatures” Still Exist?
Abstract My paper addresses both Bulgarian (more widely, East-European)
literature (especially in the first two parts) and developments that bear on the larger
framework in which literary history operates today. I revisit the notion of “minor
literatures” and show it to be an historical construct with a specific lifespan. I
also examine the ambiguity of the project of “minor literatures,” poised as it has
lately been between an understanding of “minor” as a potential social and political
energy that originates in the writing of a minority within a dominant majority
(“minoritäre Literatur”), and an evaluative notion that sees “minor literatures”
as small (“kleine Literatur”), derivative, deprived of originality when measured
by the yardstick of “mainstream literatures.” The first of these two perspectives
is sustained in Deleuze and Guattari’s classic book Kafka: Towards a Minor
Literature; the second one has a longer pedigree that goes back to the intricate
history of Eurocentrism since the 18thcentury.
Key words “minor literature”; world literature; Balkan literatures; literary canon;
Eurocentrism; centre and periphery
Author Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative
Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. He was previously Professor of
Comparative Literature and Intellectual History and founding co-director of the
Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures at the University of Manchester. His
most recent research has been on cosmopolitanism, exile, and transnationalism.
His publications include four books and nine (co)edited volumes. Tihanov is
winner, with Evgeny Dobrenko, of the Efim Etkind Prize for Best Book on Russian
Culture (2012), awarded for their co-edited A History of Russian Literary Theory
and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).
He is Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory and elected
member of Academia Europaea; he is also member of the Advisory Board of the
Institute for World Literature (IWL) at Harvard. In 2012, he delivered the Mihály
Babits Lectures. Tihanov held visiting professorships at Yale University (2007), St.
Gallen University (2012), University of Sao Paulo (2013), and Peking University
(2014).
My paper addresses both Bulgarian (more widely, East-European) literature
(especially in the first two parts) and developments that bear on the larger
framework in which literary history operates today. I demonstrate the dependence
of the idea of “minor literatures” on the broader dynamics of literary history,
offering sufficient proof that the very concept of “minor literatures” is an
historical construct with a specific (limited) life-span. What are the implications
the reconsideration of the notion of “minor literatures” might in turn have for the
changing conceptual apparatus of literary history is a question I should like to put
on the agenda in another essay; here I address this issue only in a very provisional
and rather inchoate manner.
I revisit the notion of “minor literatures” by examining the ambiguity of the
project, poised as it has lately been between an understanding of “minor” as a
potential for social and political energy that originates in the writing of a minority
within a dominant majority (“minoritäre Literatur”), and an evaluative notion
that sees “minor literatures” as small (“kleine Literatur”), derivative, deprived of
originality when measured by the yardstick of “mainstream literatures.” The first of
these two perspectives is sustained in Deleuze and Guatarri’s classic book Kafka:
Towards a Minor Literature and amplified and radicalized in their later A Thousand
Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari make it abundantly clear that the major and
minor modes are two different treatments of the (same) language of the majority
(e.g. German in Germany, Hungarian in Hungary). One of these treatments “consists
in extracting constants from it, the other in placing it in continuous variation”;
in other words, the “minor” is the force that questions and varies the major from
within.1 The second perspective — “minor” as “small” and “derivative” — has a
longer pedigree that goes back to the intricate history of Eurocentrism since the 18th
century.
1
Bulgarian literature does not seem to be particularly amenable to a study grounded
in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of deterritorialisation of language as the hallmark
of a “minor literature” produced at the margins of an established language. Deleuze
and Guattari assume a linguistic framework that presupposes already institutionally
stable national languages, and thus also a provisional canon to which a “minor”
writer relates his or her own writing. This approach, however, would end up
bracketing out the arguably most interesting century of Bulgarian literary culture,
the time from the 1760s to the 1860s when the literature of the so called “national
revival” displayed the linguistically unregulated existence of a body of writing in
becoming, without a firm canon and without prescriptive expectations of regularity
and beauty. If anything, this is the time when it is still possible for writers to
create works in other languages, which are then nonetheless adopted as part of the
Bulgarian literary corpus: Liuben Karavelov and Grigor Purlichev spring to mind.
On the other hand, a Deleuzian approach strictu senso might nonetheless be
applied in earnest to Bulgarian literature — but not just yet, it would seem on first
glance. We simply lack the knowledge base that would allow us to do so. We know
virtually nothing about writing in Bulgarian in traditional Bulgarian communities
abroad, where Bulgarian is more than the language of isolated émigré intellectuals;
nor do we know enough about the interaction of Bulgarian writers with the oral
poetry tradition of the Ottoman Empire.
Yet if we heed Deleuze’s call that, as suggested above, “minor literatures”
should be possible even where ethnic difference is not necessarily at stake, so
long as language follows, in his words, the “lines of flight” made available by a
deliberate strategy of self-exclusion on the writer’s part, then we would indeed
be able to see Bulgarian literature, especially that of the two or three decades,
in a different light. Two poems by Ani Ilkov, arguably the most powerful and
sophisticated voice in Bulgarian poetry since the late 1980s, could furnish evidence
for this process of intentional minoritisation of the major. Ilkov performs a gesture
of voluntary exile from translatability by mobilizing archaic layers of Bulgarian
right at the heart of his poetic language:
By what вершаеш сине мой By what резон св
ершаеши Сега надолу
слиза кой Вдън
мъртвите блуждаеши …2
Or even more inventively, with a deliberate (and pseudo-macaronic) mixture of
Cartesian Latin, English, and a pervasive host of obsolete forms imitating (as they
also do in the lines above) the language of Bulgarian literature from the middle of
the 19th century:
Играещиц в сияен зар Подобно
малармето Но лъсна голият му гъз
Под форма на дупе-то
……………………….
Ми летоска cogito дъж Расте което
пръска Дали и он така надлъж
Показва че присъства Поради что? By
what premise? & how it really happened?3
Remarkably, and not unexpectedly, this subversively ironic linguistic audacity was
taking place in the context, and in a sense as a supplement to, Ilkov’s heightened
social and political activism during the early and mid-1990s. Although this
moment of his career as a poet and public intellectual merits a much more detailed
consideration, I here wish to spell out only that which seems to me to be the most
essential feature of this activism: Ilkov was perhaps the most talented representative
of that brand of ferocious Eastern European anticommunism that was in favour
of democracy and a multiparty system but, as turned out in time, against the rule
of the market. The bifocal vision of these intellectuals was bound to perceive, in
Bulgaria but also elsewhere, the rise of the market and its domination over public
life as a vulgar byproduct — rather than a logical consequence — of the political
transition they had otherwise welcomed and supported.
2
But let me now move to the other, better established and still widely resonant
meaning of “minor literature” — that of “small, derivative, deprived of originality,
benighted, lagging behind,” a literature that is worth reading only in order
to corroborate or amplify already available superior examples of European
civilization. The roots of this evaluative paradigm lie back in the Enlightenment
philosophy of history. At the same time as the French philosophes discovered
progress as the supposedly uncontested trajectory of humanity, they also discovered
that different communities will arrive at that implied pinnacle of history at different
times. Apparently the direction was only one, but the circumstances and the speed
were calling for a more pluralistic picture. The very concept of civilization was
invented as a tool of locating the provisional point occupied by all these different
communities on the axis of progress. It is far from accidental that the Bulgarians
made their first prominent appearance on the large stage of world literature
precisely in the book of a French Enlightenment philosophe, in Voltaire’s Candide
(but then, again, only as a substitute designation of the Prussians); all this took
place in 1759,4 three years before Paissii of Khilendar professed his pride of
belonging to the glorious tribe of the Bulgarians.
The anthropological curiosity that flourished during the Enlightenment was
lifting entire ethnic communities from the obscurity of mere exoticism to that of
benign cultural insignificance within the emerging framework of shared European
values. If we trace the history of the entrance of Bulgarian culture into Europe, we
notice that it begins with the translation of folklore. This is true of the Slavonic
languages (the earliest example being an 1823 translation of a Bulgarian folksong
into Czech), as well as of translations into English, French, and German.5 Folklore,
however, is all about an asynchronic adoption, where cultural forms long gone
are domesticated once again as a manifestation of anonymous (and thus already
softened) exoticism; folklore reveals a previous archaic stage of cultural evolution
that cannot be sustained, or indeed, recommended any longer in the West. Most
of the time it remains an alien body in the discursive tissue of Western culture and
serves as an awkward reminder — despite Herder’s and his Romantic followers’
noble ideas — that the universal powers of humans to create fictional worlds had
not always been employed in the most sophisticated fashion.
The true history of “minor literatures,” in the sense of small and poor relatives
of the mainstream European literatures commences only with the end of the “exotic
phase” and the arrival of the more or less synchronized literary movements of
the fin-du-siècle and later the avant-garde, the many isms (Symbolism being one
of the most recognizable such phenomena) which begin to coordinate the map of
literary Europe and entangle the smaller literatures of the Balkans (and of East-
Central Europe) into a larger landscape of shared conventions and styles. Teodor
Trayanov, Nikolai Liliev, and a whole string of other Bulgarian modernists, just
as Khristo Smirnenski, Geo Milev, Chavdar Mutafov, and other representatives
of the Bulgarian post-symbolism and avant-garde, are — from this somewhat
narrower but epistemologically more rigorous perspective — the only conceivable
exponents of “minor literature” Bulgarian culture had furnished before 1945.
In a similar position, one could venture, were also dozens of writers after 1945,
who were participants in the national version of a concomitant socialist-realist
literature produced in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. In this regard (as
in many others), socialist realism was only an extension of modernity and of its
various coordinated isms which bound together the literary space of Europe (and
the world beyond) through their mandatory conventions and through an experience
of typological proximity even where the experience of simultaneity was not
immediately available.
With the demise of the isms — these smaller contributory narratives that made
up the great European narrative of literary succession and progression — the very
foundation of the axiological juxtaposition between minor and major has become
much more problematic. We live in a time when the only possible distinction that
could still render such a juxtaposition meaningful is the distinction based on the
mode of existence and functioning of language: the great languages that have
spread across continents, nurturing their own diasporic writing, and the small, or
‘minor’ languages, whose literatures have largely remained trapped in the physical
body of the respective nation state, or have — at best — inhabited, sometimes
even legitimized, its (often hotly) disputed territorial extensions (e.g. Hungarian in
Transylvania and Slovakia).
“Minor literatures” is thus a construct of literary history that experiences
today significant difficulties conditioned by changes in the way we understand
and write literary and cultural history. The first and most consequential among
these is the arrival and consolidation of transnationalism, an epistemic paradigm
that has always professed a value-neutral approach to the phenomena it seeks to
analyse, thus relaxing palpably, indeed almost altogether dispensing with, the
division between “minor” and “major” cultures and literatures. Transnationalism,
in the modern and currently well established sense of the term, was first employed
as a theoretical paradigm in the early 1970s, by political scientists who sought to
understand the impact on American foreign policy of a new and previously underconceptualised
interaction between political agents who were not identical with
the nation-states: various NGOs, international interest and pressure groups, etc.
Later on, transnationalism drew on a twofold discontent: with the undifferentiated,
blanket concept of globalisation and with what social scientists termed in the
1990s “methodological nationalism”. Although it was only in the 1990s that
recognition of the importance of transnationalism became prominent in the social
sciences, gradually making its way into the humanities as well, the impulses for a
conceptualisation of literature beyond, above, or below the level of the nation state
are historically much older. Before I proceed to examine the current situation of
strong relativisation of the value-charged opposition between “minor” and “major”
literatures and the factors that shape it, let me offer a brief historical excursus
into the ambivalent self-positioning of the field of Slavic literary studies in the
long process of methodological re-scaling beyond the constraints of the national.
“Methodological nationalism” is not, of course, a panacea; it comes with its own
limitations;6 but it is a powerful and much-needed antidote to the increasingly
embarrassing — yet still vociferous — mantras of national literary historiography.
Slavic Philology, the disowned older relative of today’s “Russian and East
European Studies,” seemed well-placed some two centuries ago, at the time of its
first steps, to contribute to this celebration of cultural production beyond borders.
Most of the literatures it wanted to explore were after all the literatures of societies
without their own nation states. What is more, they were produced in the context
of bi- or multi-lingual empires, an environment that today attracts the attention of
anthropologists and sociologists embracing the transnational research paradigm. Yet
Slavic Philology, like most other European branches of philology (but in the end
for longer than most), followed a different course; it became a voluntary instrument
of national revivals and rivalries, often working with entities and labels larger than
the nation, only to reaffirm and enhance its — the nation’s — priority. The idea
of Slavdom, for example, was employed by many of the Russian Slavophiles and
pochvenniki as an imperial weapon of hegemony, or, in its Polish version, as a
justification and embodiment of messianic dreams. Ironically, the first outlines of
the idea of Slavdom were actually written in non-Slavic languages: the Dominican
monk Vinko Priboevich published in Venice in 1532 his De origine successibusque
Slavorum, followed by Mauro Urbini’s Il regno de gli Slavi (1601), a key-text for
the first Bulgarian history written in 1762, which signaled the onset of Bulgarian
nationalism.
The dynamics of this process is more complex than a brief survey could
suggest. Towards the end of the 19th century, with the Slavic nation-states in the
Balkans feeling more confident after successful completion of their long struggles
for independence and unification, the paradigm of kinship and superiority fuelled
by the notion of a Christian Slavdom began to compete with regional optics
allowing for cultural and religious variety, and even conflict. A good example of
this new perspective, insisting on diversity, was the growth of Balkan Studies. If
Viktor Zhirmunskii is correct, Balkan Studies (“balkanistika,” “Balkanistik”) made
its entrance as a discipline only in the late 1890s (more precisely, 1896-1898, in
Vols. 13 and 15 of Sbornik za narodni umotvoreniia, nauka i knizhnina, where
Ivan Shishmanov’s well-known study on The Song about the Dead Brother in the
Poetry of the Balkan Peoples was published).7 An adherent of the migration school
in the study of Folklore, Shishmanov believed in a freely floating body of motifs
that recognised no state borders. Although he never posed the crucial question
of subjectivity and agency — in the primeval anonymity of folklore, the rupture,
asymmetry, and estrangement accompanying the act of border-crossing was not an
issue — Shishmanov and the many scholars who followed in his steps refused to
assert the (by then customary) axiological distinction between “small” and “great
literatures.” Not by accident were these scholars more interested in folklore than
in literature per se, understood in the modern sense produced and implied by the
evaluative discriminations already in place by the late 19th century.
But this healthy preoccupation did not last. Local differences of intensity and
pace aside, after World War One and throughout the Soviet age, to some extent
even during the transition to the free market (in this respect, political caesurae did
not necessarily amount to paradigmatic shifts) writing literary history under the
umbrella of the nation state — even when this was done within the larger domain
of a communist commonwealth — became once again, in Bulgaria and in most
other Eastern European countries, a safe recipe for projecting one’s own literature
as suspiciously unique — which, in fact, was little else than the other side of
“minor,” “derivative,” “obscure,” “small.” Claiming a stake in European culture
meant claiming a well-guarded corner, a little patch of exclusive, unmatched and
unmatchable literary experience. The dislodgment of “minor” literature as an
evaluative paradigm could thus not occur before the gradual downfall of literary
history as a discourse sponsored by the nation state.
3
The receding significance of the nation state and the ensuing relativisation
of the distinction between “small” and “large” literatures are today driven by
modifications of the wider framework in which the practice of literary history takes
place. Understanding these modifications seems to me an essential first step. In
addition to the nation state (on which I dwell at more considerable length), below
I concentrate on two more factors (the media and the evolution of society and of
the idea and institutions of university education under the pressure of demographic
changes), and seek to elucidate and weigh their importance for the gradual waning
of the axiological matrix anchored in the opposition of “minor” and “major.”8
The Nation State
The origins of literary history as an institutionalized discourse are closely
interwoven with the fortunes of nationalism and the nation state after the French
Revolution. Although the first chairs of literature were conceived to teach and
profess the letters without particular national restrictions, the post-Napoleonic
period marked by the rise of nationalism in Europe saw a gradual transition towards
a nationally focused research and teaching agenda. Literature itself was seen as an
instrument of preserving and glorifying “those great national memories that are
in the dim past of a national history” (Schlegel 15) — and so was literary history.
As Cornis-Pope and Neubauer have recently argued,9 the study of literature and its
history was first institutionalized in societies that were concerned to cultivate a clear
national identity and gain state sovereignty (Germany, Italy, Central and Eastern
Europe) — although it would be true to say that in England, where statehood and
national identity had been established very early on, literary historiography took
off ahead of any such attempts in the countries mentioned above (Thomas Warton
published between 1774 and 1781 three volumes of his unfinished literary history,
only making it to the time of the Reformation).10 In Germany, the first literary
history appeared long before the unification of the country under Bismarck in 1871:
between 1835 and 1842, Georg Gervinus published a five-volume Geschichte
der poetischen Nationalliteratur der Deutschen (the title was later changed to
Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung); this was half a century earlier than the first
great history of French literature by Gustave Lanson which appeared in 1895.
In Italy, De Sanctis published a two-volume history of Italian literature in 1870-
71, after the unification of the country, but still twenty years ahead of Lanson.
Even though Gervinus did not agree with the politics by which Bismarck sought
to achieve the unification of Germany, his history was a powerful instrument in
constructing an awareness of German cultural homogeneity.
The future of this pattern that has enjoyed unquestioned domination for over
a century is now highly uncertain. There are several reasons for this. To start
with, Eurocentrism itself has been losing ground ever since World War I, and
with it also the European model of nation-centred literary history. This process
was exacerbated by the arrival of globalisation on the crest of revolutionary
discoveries in information technology in the 1950s, which coincided with the swift
dismantling of the colonial system. The ensuing growth of diasporic cultures,
on the one hand, and the process of European integration in the context of a
globalised economy, on the other, gave rise to occurrences best described as the
gradual “hollowing-out” of the nation state in the West. A single unified canon, on
which to base literary history, became increasingly untenable. Within the nationstate,
there emerged a string of parallel canons called upon to rectify the social
injustices of the past. For those willing to see it, there is at present a very strong
signal heralding the move away from national (literary) histories: the talk now,
especially in Germany, where Goethe had dreamt of a “world literature,” is of how
to construct a representative European canon, which would stimulate and draw on
the writing of regional histories or, ideally, of a history of European literature at
large. A joint French-German history textbook, written with the intention of being
used in schools in both countries was introduced to the public in 2007. Nor is this
pastime of the rich alone. Concerned with security and determined to see an ever
expanding market, the European Union and various NGOs compete in the Balkans
in sponsoring textbooks that are meant to teach the younger generations that they
all have a shared political and cultural history.11 Thus we face two developments,
none of which is hospitable to the traditional literary history commissioned by
the nation state (itself further enfeebled today by the drive to surrender ever more
power to enable Brussels to fire-fight the raging crisis of sovereign debt): either
regional, and even “pan-European” histories, serving a different set of political
goals from those so familiar from the recent past, or transnational, often also
transcontinental, narratives heeding not the monolithic projects of the nation state
but rather, as Stephen Greenblatt demands, the postcolonial processes of “exile,
emigration, wandering, contamination, and unexpected consequences, along
with the fierce compulsions of greed, longing, and restlessness, for — Greenblatt
continues — it is these disruptive forces that principally shape the history and
diffusion of languages, and not a rooted sense of cultural legitimacy.12 Needless to
say, Greenblatt’s message also carries the connotation of skepticism toward, and
critique of, the power aspects of conquest, mobility, and the hybrid proliferation
of national languages. But it asserts in no uncertain terms the superior viability of
cultural production based on such developments: moving beyond the straightjacket
of the nation-state, freeing up the potential of language to change as it wanders
across continents and social strata, letting language coin its own forms of existence
in exile, transition, and miscegenation.13
As traditional national literary history takes pains to remain in business, it
seeks to accommodate these new developments. A fresh example provides the
new Oxford English Literary History in 13 volumes, which will dedicate two
volumes to the post-World War II period, both designed to compete with, and
qualify, each other in the way they interpret Englishness: the volume 1960-2000:
The Last of England, written by Randall Stevenson, described as a “Scotsman who
believes that the idea of ‘English literature’ is no longer a possibility,” and another
volume, 1948-2000: The Internationalisation of English Literature, written by
the Canadian Bruce King who celebrates multiculturalism not as the end but as
a revival of this idea.14 (Note also that these two volumes interpret differently the
lower chronological boundary of the period they explore.) The new Oxford history
is thus seeking to transpose — without canceling — the largely exhausted national
narrative into the tonality of multicultural globalism.
With reference to Eastern Europe, it is only during the last twenty years
that we came to witness the manifestations (still sometimes ruptured, as I noted
earlier, by a resilient mentality of uniqueness and exclusivity) of a momentous
methodological superimposition, leading away from the postulates of a languagecentred
“methodological nationalism”: Slavic Philology began to share territory
and prestige with “Russian and East European Studies,” the latter being essentially
an area studies paradigm determined to reduce the specific weight of language
variety — and thus of literature as well — in the way the cultural production of
the post-Soviet era is studied and taught. Thus, historically, looking at Bulgarian
literature in particular, we can identify the succession (at times also the overlap)
of three particular optics: the Slavic (“slavistika”/“slavianska filologiia;”
“Slavistik”/“Slavische Philologie;” “Slavonic Studies”/ “Slavic Philology”), the
Balkan (“balkanistika”/”balkanski filologii;” “Balkanologie;” “Balkan Studies”),
and the East-European, or post-communist, paradigm (“Russian and East European
Studies”/ “South-East European Studies”). As one can readily see, the philological
element is on the wane; while the first, partly also the second, link of the chain
accommodate the philological component as fully expressive of the whole, the
third one no longer does. The trend observed in this succession is that of an ever
more overt political interest that attends to the literary aspects of literature only to
the extent to which they are representative of larger patterns of social and political
evolution. Evaluative judgments are more often than not demobilsed and suspended
in the process.
The Media
Marshall McLuhan’s assertion according to which the medium is the message
(23-36) regains resonance today as we try to chart the fortunes of literary history
and the impact on the previously entrenched but currently ever more shaky
distinction between “minor” and “major” literatures.
The business of literary history has changed dramatically over the last 60
years in large measure due to the changing media of its appropriation. There
are several aspects to this change. First of all, the pattern of the consumption of
literature underwent a significant alteration. Film adaptations of the national canons
abound, making it easy to delude oneself that watching Sense and Sensibility
exempts one from reading Jane Austin. The accessibility of the classics through
low-budget television versions gradually came to bridge the gap between high
and popular literature that the discipline of literary history has depended on all
along. To be sure, it was literary history in the first place that instituted the division
between “high” and “low,” and conjured works initially serialized in newspapers
for the entertainment (also for the edification, needless to say) of the wider reading
public into masterpieces of high culture. Many of the 19th century novels, including
those of Dostoevsky and Balzac, among others, were subject to such metamorphic
refashioning at the hands of academic literary historians in the decades following
their first publication. Now the table has been turned on the literary historian: the
plethora of films, radio adaptations, comics etc. has plunged the profession into a
world where the previous security furnished by the canon has all but vanished. The
supposedly unique act of the silent reading has been brutally ousted by the mass
consumption of visual surrogates perceived to be better at emphasizing the plot and
the costumes rather than the supposedly great philosophical message of the literary
work of art. Thus literary historians have been left wandering without a compass
in the thicket of a culture that is neither high nor low but subsists instead on the
reproducibility of the sacred in a myriad of everyday instances of overlapping
performance, profanation, and epiphany.
The second aspect is induced by the all-too-powerful presence of the
new electronic media. Ever since Baudrillard,15 we have learned to question
the boundary between fact and fiction in the workings of the electronic press.
Not only has literature ceased to be, in Hillis Miller’s nostalgic words, the sole
purveyor of virtual reality;16 moreover, modern media, in particular the interactive
technologies, have brought about an unprecedented openness of the text to
simultaneous modification by the recipient. Thus the status of the text has changed
beyond the comfortable manageability on which traditional literary history rests.
The disobedient text that emerges in the process of the electronic interaction is
open-ended, mobile as never before, and truly boundless; not even the conceptual
armament of intertextuality is any longer capable of domesticating it. An everfluid
hypertext renders the customary articulation of semantic entities obsolete and
unreliable. The result is an archive of semantically dynamic deposits, which can
be added to or subtracted from at liberty at any time. The author/reader boundary
is totally erased, and so are the foundations of reception theory and the traditional
literary history with its rigid value distinctions.
Finally, the global network creates a vast electronic library, where national
traditions and loyalties are quickly destabilized. Fragmentary in its foundations,
the experience of the internet-driven reader contributes to a new paradigm of
interpretation where reference and comparison no longer originate with compelling
logic from a historically verifiable pool of national writing. To make sense of a
story or a poem, both teachers and students of literature now often depend on
support from the global bank of plots and images that feeds the mind without
asking questions about the historical or national appropriateness of the material
supplied. The electronic media and the Internet thus confront literary history with
the challenges of simultaneity and deracination; they usher in a new age of a
labeled as “minor” or “major,” “great” or “inferior.” In this market, the nation-state
increasingly loses its power of canon-formation; moreover, the power of educating
and molding its own citizens in a fashion and through means that are controlled by
the nation-state also slips away.
Demographics
Habermas, among others, has recently asked the incommodious (to put it
mildly) question of “the future of human nature.”17 He placed this question in the
bedrock of modern genetics and the inevitable — and as yet unforeseeable —
changes that are to follow from the arrival of cloning and the genetic modification
of human material. From my standpoint, there are two interconnected issues at
stake here: longevity and memory. Both plunge the commentator into previously
unexplored depths. With an ever growing life expectancy and the corresponding
attempts at managing it through various economic and administrative techniques,
how is memory to be distributed socially? In the wake of the alterations dormant in
the management of longevity, how will the perception change of what constitutes
the formative experiences and segments of human life: childhood and adolescence?
Three of the essential cornerstones of literary history — indeed of any history —
will be heading for dramatic transformation. One is the concept of generation;
the other one is the notion of period; and the last one — the notion of novelness
(what constitutes novelty in the literary and ideological life of society), and thus
also the notion of value. Traditional literary history has been reliant on these
concepts to provide a meaningful centre of interpretation. It will not be enough to
realize that periods in literary and intellectual history are discursive ideological
constructs; so much is known even now. The real issue at stake is the changing
lifespan of generations, and with this the changing rhythms of the production of
meaning. Public consent over key events underlying the narrative of the historian
is likely to be reached in an ever more complicated and mediated fashion, because
the constitutive voices of the generational ensemble will each have a temporality,
duration, and therefore force, different from those informing the practice of
(literary) historiography at present. Whether microhistory or any other tools
favoured by modern historiography will be able to respond to these challenges
is far from certain. I do not wish to sound as the purveyor of mythology: it is
the realities of progress in genetics and the impending growth in longevity on a
previously unprecedented scale that urge us to rethink the foundations of (literary)
history in the future.
It is apposite here — and of a more immediate relevance for our study of the
fading opposition between “large” and “small,” “major” and “minor” literatures
— to stress that literary history has always been largely sustained by the generally
secure, at least in Europe, market of university and school education; without this
market, it is difficult to assume that literary history would be a viable enterprise
today. But what we see in recent years, precisely as part of the economic and social
techniques of demographic control, is the introduction of a totally new concept of
education. The so-called “continuing education,” or “life-long education,” which is
now part of the educational landscape throughout Europe and America, slowly but
securely redefines the philosophy of education, leaving behind the dogma of clearcut
disciplinarity. The pick-and-mix approach of the Western-style educational
supermarket is there to stay and to be employed in regular sequences throughout
the life of the individual. Having to serve this ever growing market, as well as the
modular system of undergraduate education, is already impacting on the scope of
research undertaken in the modern university. Thus we are witnessing a new cycle
of education and employment, which no longer separates the two, and a new social
task for education to live up to. All this contributes to a new climate of learning and
scholarship, in which authoritative knowledge and the guarding cult for particular
subjects and their inherent hierarchies of values and quality look increasingly
inadequate.18
4
Let me recapitulate my argument so far. The origins of literary history as an
institutionalized discourse are closely interwoven with the fortunes of nationalism
and the nation state after the French Revolution. However, Eurocentrism itself
has been losing ground since World War I, and with it also the European model
of nation-centred literary history. As the global economy undergoes today a
painful readjustment and, more importantly, a slow but seemingly unstoppable
rebalancing towards the new power-houses of growth in the Far East, on the
Indian Sub-Continent, and in Latin America, the very idea of a binding Euro-
North American literary canon, within which established notions of centre and
periphery remain meaningful, grows weaker and less tenable. Today we witness a
transition to either regional, and even “pan-European,” histories, serving a different
set of political goals from those so familiar from the recent past, or transnational
narratives heeding not the monolithic projects of the nation state, of which earlier
literary histories across Europe were representative, but rather the processes of
exile, emigration, creolisation, and the hybridization of languages.19 Regional
literary history, in particular, is beginning to occupy an ever more prominent
place, as it endeavours to heed and reveal the “ambiguities and overlaps” (Gellner)
in situations of plurilingualism and ethnic border-crossing concealed by the
centralized nation-state.20
The business of literary history has been transformed dramatically also by
the changing media of appropriating and consuming literature. First of all, the
pattern of the consumption of literature underwent a significant alteration, placing
the texts of the canon within easy reach through numerous visual adaptations,
thus destabilizing their very nature as canonic works of literature and erasing the
boundary between “high” and “popular.” Moreover, modern media, in particular
the interactive technologies, have brought about an unprecedented openness of
the text to simultaneous modification by the recipient. The status of the text has
changed beyond the comfortable manageability on which traditional literary history
rests. The disobedient text that emerges from the process of electronic interaction
is open-ended, mobile as never before, and truly boundless. Literature thus moves
freely between centre and periphery, enfeebling the conceptual framework posited
by these two notions. Not only from the point of view of transnational bordercrossing,
migration, and exile, but also from that of media theory has a clear
distinction between centre and periphery, between “minor” and “major” literary
texts become highly suspect. In the age of incessant transnational information flows
literature no longer has fixed abode or audience (in Ottmar Ette’s words, literature
has lost its “permanent address”21), nor does it any longer come with secure value
markers attached to it.
Crucially, all the factors I have discussed in this article, including the
dramatically changing ideas and practices of education, which put the sustainability
of the old disciplinary knowledge under such enormous strain, along with the
dwindling power of the nation-state to guard and inculcate the values of the
traditional canons, or to form new ones, seem to be pointing in the same direction:
the axiological discrimination between “small” and “great,” “minor” and “major”
literatures becomes increasingly untenable. As a matter of fact, this very distinction,
as I essayed to demonstrate, is itself a historical product with — as any other
time-bound product — a limited life-span: the distinction between “major” and
“minor” literatures was the outcome of an era of thriving national traditions and
strong nation states, but also — equally important — of a complacent Eurocentric
framework populated and propped by the contributory narratives of various artistic
isms, which, in their totality, constituted the coordinated space of the “republic of
letters,” apparently homogenous but below the surface built on cultural hierarchies
and ridden by conflicts, revolts, and struggles for international domination and
significance.22 To describe its map, the categories of centre and periphery, canon
and deviation, focus and margin were meaningfully employed. This conceptual
apparatus now looks increasingly challenged and enfeebled by the encounter
with a newly constituted transnational cultural process, in which evaluative
discriminations are ever more difficult to uphold. Instead, we are entering the
regime of a complex (and constant) marginocentricity,23 in which centre and
periphery become fluid, mobile, and provisional, prone to swapping their places
and exchanging cultural valences.
This is not to say that inequalities disappear; as a matter of fact, globalization
does create and reveal new sets of inequalities. But we need to begin to
acknowledge that, in the same breath, it renders the opposition between centre
and periphery less meaningful, as it moves away from the idea of a shared (Euro-
North American) canon that underpins this distinction in the first place. Rather,
we are witnessing a new regime of relevance where difference — drawn not least
from what we used to call the zones of cultural marginality — is commodified and
homogenized into a single, globally marketed cultural product;24 the defiant spirit
of marginality and “minor literatures” is processed away, leaving us with a new
stock of goods that change hands smoothly — at airports and, virtually, in a myriad
of chat-rooms.
Of course, it remains important to uncover the traces of that lost potentiality,
of the activist marginality that globalization tends to obliterate so insidiously. At
the same time we might be well-advised to admit that one of the most unpalatable
effects of globalization has indeed been to confront us with the reality of the minor
now functioning as a “fixed” feature, a reterritorialized appellation, a commodity
label. Alas, this new, static condition of ready-to-consume “minority” has very little
to do with the productive and challenging “becoming” that extracts “continuous
variation,” to recall Deleuze and Guattari’s later imperative. Instead, we are in the
grip of a regime of relevance that suspends the process of “becoming” and “installs
a new constant,”25 in which major and minor, canonical and marginal have only
limited conceptual validity.26
Notes
1. See Deleuze and Guattari (1986) and (1988: 106).
2. See Ani Ilkov’s poem “Edin zmei v Tsarigrad” (51).
3. See Ilkov’s poem “Otpad”tsi na edin zmei [(b) ‘Malarmeta’]” (54).
4. For earlier mentions of Bulgaria in the literatures of Western Europe, see Staitscheva.
5. Further details can be found in Traikov. For more on the dynamics and ideology of translating
Bulgarian literature in the West see Tihanov.
6. See Robert Fine’s critique in Fine (9-14).
7. See Aretov 65-7; on Shishmanov and the growth of Balkan Studies, see also Mishkova 67-70.
8. The following discussion draws partly on arguments developed in my article “The Future of
Literary History: Three Challenges in the 21st Century.” Primerjalna književnost 31.1 (2008): 65-
72 (Romanian translation: “Viitorul istoriei literare: trei provocari pentru secolul XXI.” Analele
Universitatii Bucuresti 57 (2008): 89-96; Slovene translation: “Prihodnost literarne zgodovine:
trije izzivi 21.stoletja.” Primerjalna književnost v 20. stoletju in Anton Ocvirk. Ed. Darko Dolinar
and Marko Juvan. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, ZRC SAZU, 2008. 325-32; Hungarian translation:
“Az irodalomtörténet jövője: Három kihívás a 21. században.” Korunk 23.2 (2012): 49-54.
9. See Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 12.
10. For a skeptical take, from a different perspective, on the argument in Cornis-Pope and
Neubauer, see Biti (75-6).
11. See e.g. the project for a shared textbook of Balkan history supported by the Pact for Stability,
as reported in Portalski.
12. See Greenblatt.
13. See also Greenblatt’s later take on cultural mobility in the opening and concluding essays to
Greenblatt.
14. Cf. Bate.
15. See above all Baudrillard’s notorious pamphlet The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
16. See Hillis Miller.
17. See Habermas.
18. For a wider picture of the methodological and civic anxieties of literary scholarship in the
twenty-first century, see most recently Alber et al. and Olsen and Pettersson.
19. On various new forms of hybridity in literature, see, for example, Sturm-Trigonakis and
Knauth.
20. Cf. Strutz (254), from whom I borrow some of the terminology here.
21. See the argument in Ette; the German original was published in 2001 under the title Literatur
in Bewegung. Raum und Dynamik grenzüberschreitenden Schreibens in Europa und Amerika.
22. See Casanova .
23. I extend and radicalise here the notion of marginocentricity applied by Marcel Cornis-Pope
to what he calls the ‘marginocentric cities’ of Eastern Europe; he defines ‘marginocentric cities’
as peripheral cities which display a “tendency to challenge the hegemony of the metropolitan
centers, offering an alternative to their national pull” (Cornis-Pope 8).
24. On the process I term ‘commodification of difference’, see also Tihanov.
25. The quoted words in this and the previous sentence are from Deleuze and Guattari (104).
26. I am grateful to Vladimir Biti and Henrike Schmidt for their helpful comments on an earlier
version of this essay.
Works Cited
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Aretov, Nikolai. „Slaviansko vs. balkansko.“ Pod znaka na evropeiskite kulturni dialozi. Sbornik
v pamet na profesor Boian Nichev. Ed. Khristina Balabanova et al.. Sofia: Sofia UP, 2007.
62-71.
Bate, Jonathan. “A Monumental Task. Why the new Oxford English History will differ from its
predecessor?” The Times Literary Supplement 4 October 2002.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.
Biti, Vladimir. “In the Name of the Altogether Other.” Writing Literary History: Selected
Perspectives from Central Europe. Ed. Darko Dolinar and Marko Juvan. Bern: Peter Lang.
2006. 67-79.
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP,
2004 [French ed. 1999].
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Central Europe: Theoretical Reflections [ACLS Occasional Paper, 52]. New York: American
Council of Learned Societies, 2002.
Cornis-Pope, Marcel. “Introduction: Representing East-Central Europe’s Marginocentric Cities.”
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Neubauer. Vol. 2. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006. 8-11.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 [French ed. 1975].
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: The
Athlone Press, 1988 [French ed. 1980].
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Fine, Robert. Cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge, 2007.
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Racial Memory and Literary History.” Rethinking Literary History: A
Dialogue on Theory. Ed. Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés. Oxford and New York:
Oxford UP, 2002. 50-62.
Greenblatt, Stephen et al. Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge: Polity, 2003 [German ed. 2001].
Hillis Miller, J. “A defense of literature and literary study in a time of globalization and the new
tele-technologies.” Neohelicon 34.2 (2007): 13-22.
Ilkov, Ani. Mala AZiIA na Dushata. Sofia: Izdatelsko atelie Ab, 2004.
Knauth, Alfons K. „Weltliteratur: Von der Mehrsprachigkeit zur Mischsprachigkeit.“ Literatur
und Vielsprachigkeit. Ed. Monika Schmitz-Emans. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2004. 81-110.
Mishkova, Diana. “What is in Balkan History? Spaces and Scales in the Tradition of Southeast-
European Studies.” Southeastern Europe 34 (2009): 60-91.
Olsen, Stein Haugom, and Anders Pettersson, eds. Why Literary Studies? Raisons D’être of a
Discipline. Oslo: Novus Press, 2011.
Portalski, A. “S kakvo zapochvat rodinata i Evropa.” Literaturen vestnik [Sofia] 15 May 2002.
Schlegel, Friedrich. Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur [1815]. Kritische Friedrich-
Schlegel-Ausgabe. Ed. Ernst Behler. Vol. 6. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1961.
Staitscheva, Emilia. “Zur bulgarischen Motivik in der deutschen Literatur. Eine Randerscheinung
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393-401.
Strutz, Janez. „Dialogue, Polyphony, and System: On the Issue of a History of the ‚Small
Literatures’ in the Alps-Adriatic Region.“ Writing Literary History: Selected Perspectives
from Central Europe. Ed. Darko Dolinar and Marko Juvan. Bern: Peter Lang. 2006. 237-63.
Sturm-Trigonakis, Elke. Global playing in der Literatur. Ein Versuch über die neue Weltliteratur.
Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2007.
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Primerjalna književnost 31.1 (2008): 65-72.
—. “Appropriations of Bulgarian Literature in the West: From Pencho Slaveikov to Iordan
Iovkov.” Bulgaria and Europe: Shifting Identities. Ed. Stefanos Katsikas. London: Anthem,
2010. 33-42; 212-215 (notes).
—. “Cosmopolitanism in the Discursive Landscape of Moderntiy: Two Enlightenment
Articulations.” Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism. Ed. David Adams and Galin Tihanov.
London: Legenda, 2011. 133-152.
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Nauka i izkustvo, 1964.
literature (especially in the first two parts) and developments that bear on the larger
framework in which literary history operates today. I revisit the notion of “minor
literatures” and show it to be an historical construct with a specific lifespan. I
also examine the ambiguity of the project of “minor literatures,” poised as it has
lately been between an understanding of “minor” as a potential social and political
energy that originates in the writing of a minority within a dominant majority
(“minoritäre Literatur”), and an evaluative notion that sees “minor literatures”
as small (“kleine Literatur”), derivative, deprived of originality when measured
by the yardstick of “mainstream literatures.” The first of these two perspectives
is sustained in Deleuze and Guattari’s classic book Kafka: Towards a Minor
Literature; the second one has a longer pedigree that goes back to the intricate
history of Eurocentrism since the 18thcentury.
Key words “minor literature”; world literature; Balkan literatures; literary canon;
Eurocentrism; centre and periphery
Author Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative
Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. He was previously Professor of
Comparative Literature and Intellectual History and founding co-director of the
Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures at the University of Manchester. His
most recent research has been on cosmopolitanism, exile, and transnationalism.
His publications include four books and nine (co)edited volumes. Tihanov is
winner, with Evgeny Dobrenko, of the Efim Etkind Prize for Best Book on Russian
Culture (2012), awarded for their co-edited A History of Russian Literary Theory
and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).
He is Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory and elected
member of Academia Europaea; he is also member of the Advisory Board of the
Institute for World Literature (IWL) at Harvard. In 2012, he delivered the Mihály
Babits Lectures. Tihanov held visiting professorships at Yale University (2007), St.
Gallen University (2012), University of Sao Paulo (2013), and Peking University
(2014).
My paper addresses both Bulgarian (more widely, East-European) literature
(especially in the first two parts) and developments that bear on the larger
framework in which literary history operates today. I demonstrate the dependence
of the idea of “minor literatures” on the broader dynamics of literary history,
offering sufficient proof that the very concept of “minor literatures” is an
historical construct with a specific (limited) life-span. What are the implications
the reconsideration of the notion of “minor literatures” might in turn have for the
changing conceptual apparatus of literary history is a question I should like to put
on the agenda in another essay; here I address this issue only in a very provisional
and rather inchoate manner.
I revisit the notion of “minor literatures” by examining the ambiguity of the
project, poised as it has lately been between an understanding of “minor” as a
potential for social and political energy that originates in the writing of a minority
within a dominant majority (“minoritäre Literatur”), and an evaluative notion
that sees “minor literatures” as small (“kleine Literatur”), derivative, deprived of
originality when measured by the yardstick of “mainstream literatures.” The first of
these two perspectives is sustained in Deleuze and Guatarri’s classic book Kafka:
Towards a Minor Literature and amplified and radicalized in their later A Thousand
Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari make it abundantly clear that the major and
minor modes are two different treatments of the (same) language of the majority
(e.g. German in Germany, Hungarian in Hungary). One of these treatments “consists
in extracting constants from it, the other in placing it in continuous variation”;
in other words, the “minor” is the force that questions and varies the major from
within.1 The second perspective — “minor” as “small” and “derivative” — has a
longer pedigree that goes back to the intricate history of Eurocentrism since the 18th
century.
1
Bulgarian literature does not seem to be particularly amenable to a study grounded
in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of deterritorialisation of language as the hallmark
of a “minor literature” produced at the margins of an established language. Deleuze
and Guattari assume a linguistic framework that presupposes already institutionally
stable national languages, and thus also a provisional canon to which a “minor”
writer relates his or her own writing. This approach, however, would end up
bracketing out the arguably most interesting century of Bulgarian literary culture,
the time from the 1760s to the 1860s when the literature of the so called “national
revival” displayed the linguistically unregulated existence of a body of writing in
becoming, without a firm canon and without prescriptive expectations of regularity
and beauty. If anything, this is the time when it is still possible for writers to
create works in other languages, which are then nonetheless adopted as part of the
Bulgarian literary corpus: Liuben Karavelov and Grigor Purlichev spring to mind.
On the other hand, a Deleuzian approach strictu senso might nonetheless be
applied in earnest to Bulgarian literature — but not just yet, it would seem on first
glance. We simply lack the knowledge base that would allow us to do so. We know
virtually nothing about writing in Bulgarian in traditional Bulgarian communities
abroad, where Bulgarian is more than the language of isolated émigré intellectuals;
nor do we know enough about the interaction of Bulgarian writers with the oral
poetry tradition of the Ottoman Empire.
Yet if we heed Deleuze’s call that, as suggested above, “minor literatures”
should be possible even where ethnic difference is not necessarily at stake, so
long as language follows, in his words, the “lines of flight” made available by a
deliberate strategy of self-exclusion on the writer’s part, then we would indeed
be able to see Bulgarian literature, especially that of the two or three decades,
in a different light. Two poems by Ani Ilkov, arguably the most powerful and
sophisticated voice in Bulgarian poetry since the late 1980s, could furnish evidence
for this process of intentional minoritisation of the major. Ilkov performs a gesture
of voluntary exile from translatability by mobilizing archaic layers of Bulgarian
right at the heart of his poetic language:
By what вершаеш сине мой By what резон св
ершаеши Сега надолу
слиза кой Вдън
мъртвите блуждаеши …2
Or even more inventively, with a deliberate (and pseudo-macaronic) mixture of
Cartesian Latin, English, and a pervasive host of obsolete forms imitating (as they
also do in the lines above) the language of Bulgarian literature from the middle of
the 19th century:
Играещиц в сияен зар Подобно
малармето Но лъсна голият му гъз
Под форма на дупе-то
……………………….
Ми летоска cogito дъж Расте което
пръска Дали и он така надлъж
Показва че присъства Поради что? By
what premise? & how it really happened?3
Remarkably, and not unexpectedly, this subversively ironic linguistic audacity was
taking place in the context, and in a sense as a supplement to, Ilkov’s heightened
social and political activism during the early and mid-1990s. Although this
moment of his career as a poet and public intellectual merits a much more detailed
consideration, I here wish to spell out only that which seems to me to be the most
essential feature of this activism: Ilkov was perhaps the most talented representative
of that brand of ferocious Eastern European anticommunism that was in favour
of democracy and a multiparty system but, as turned out in time, against the rule
of the market. The bifocal vision of these intellectuals was bound to perceive, in
Bulgaria but also elsewhere, the rise of the market and its domination over public
life as a vulgar byproduct — rather than a logical consequence — of the political
transition they had otherwise welcomed and supported.
2
But let me now move to the other, better established and still widely resonant
meaning of “minor literature” — that of “small, derivative, deprived of originality,
benighted, lagging behind,” a literature that is worth reading only in order
to corroborate or amplify already available superior examples of European
civilization. The roots of this evaluative paradigm lie back in the Enlightenment
philosophy of history. At the same time as the French philosophes discovered
progress as the supposedly uncontested trajectory of humanity, they also discovered
that different communities will arrive at that implied pinnacle of history at different
times. Apparently the direction was only one, but the circumstances and the speed
were calling for a more pluralistic picture. The very concept of civilization was
invented as a tool of locating the provisional point occupied by all these different
communities on the axis of progress. It is far from accidental that the Bulgarians
made their first prominent appearance on the large stage of world literature
precisely in the book of a French Enlightenment philosophe, in Voltaire’s Candide
(but then, again, only as a substitute designation of the Prussians); all this took
place in 1759,4 three years before Paissii of Khilendar professed his pride of
belonging to the glorious tribe of the Bulgarians.
The anthropological curiosity that flourished during the Enlightenment was
lifting entire ethnic communities from the obscurity of mere exoticism to that of
benign cultural insignificance within the emerging framework of shared European
values. If we trace the history of the entrance of Bulgarian culture into Europe, we
notice that it begins with the translation of folklore. This is true of the Slavonic
languages (the earliest example being an 1823 translation of a Bulgarian folksong
into Czech), as well as of translations into English, French, and German.5 Folklore,
however, is all about an asynchronic adoption, where cultural forms long gone
are domesticated once again as a manifestation of anonymous (and thus already
softened) exoticism; folklore reveals a previous archaic stage of cultural evolution
that cannot be sustained, or indeed, recommended any longer in the West. Most
of the time it remains an alien body in the discursive tissue of Western culture and
serves as an awkward reminder — despite Herder’s and his Romantic followers’
noble ideas — that the universal powers of humans to create fictional worlds had
not always been employed in the most sophisticated fashion.
The true history of “minor literatures,” in the sense of small and poor relatives
of the mainstream European literatures commences only with the end of the “exotic
phase” and the arrival of the more or less synchronized literary movements of
the fin-du-siècle and later the avant-garde, the many isms (Symbolism being one
of the most recognizable such phenomena) which begin to coordinate the map of
literary Europe and entangle the smaller literatures of the Balkans (and of East-
Central Europe) into a larger landscape of shared conventions and styles. Teodor
Trayanov, Nikolai Liliev, and a whole string of other Bulgarian modernists, just
as Khristo Smirnenski, Geo Milev, Chavdar Mutafov, and other representatives
of the Bulgarian post-symbolism and avant-garde, are — from this somewhat
narrower but epistemologically more rigorous perspective — the only conceivable
exponents of “minor literature” Bulgarian culture had furnished before 1945.
In a similar position, one could venture, were also dozens of writers after 1945,
who were participants in the national version of a concomitant socialist-realist
literature produced in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. In this regard (as
in many others), socialist realism was only an extension of modernity and of its
various coordinated isms which bound together the literary space of Europe (and
the world beyond) through their mandatory conventions and through an experience
of typological proximity even where the experience of simultaneity was not
immediately available.
With the demise of the isms — these smaller contributory narratives that made
up the great European narrative of literary succession and progression — the very
foundation of the axiological juxtaposition between minor and major has become
much more problematic. We live in a time when the only possible distinction that
could still render such a juxtaposition meaningful is the distinction based on the
mode of existence and functioning of language: the great languages that have
spread across continents, nurturing their own diasporic writing, and the small, or
‘minor’ languages, whose literatures have largely remained trapped in the physical
body of the respective nation state, or have — at best — inhabited, sometimes
even legitimized, its (often hotly) disputed territorial extensions (e.g. Hungarian in
Transylvania and Slovakia).
“Minor literatures” is thus a construct of literary history that experiences
today significant difficulties conditioned by changes in the way we understand
and write literary and cultural history. The first and most consequential among
these is the arrival and consolidation of transnationalism, an epistemic paradigm
that has always professed a value-neutral approach to the phenomena it seeks to
analyse, thus relaxing palpably, indeed almost altogether dispensing with, the
division between “minor” and “major” cultures and literatures. Transnationalism,
in the modern and currently well established sense of the term, was first employed
as a theoretical paradigm in the early 1970s, by political scientists who sought to
understand the impact on American foreign policy of a new and previously underconceptualised
interaction between political agents who were not identical with
the nation-states: various NGOs, international interest and pressure groups, etc.
Later on, transnationalism drew on a twofold discontent: with the undifferentiated,
blanket concept of globalisation and with what social scientists termed in the
1990s “methodological nationalism”. Although it was only in the 1990s that
recognition of the importance of transnationalism became prominent in the social
sciences, gradually making its way into the humanities as well, the impulses for a
conceptualisation of literature beyond, above, or below the level of the nation state
are historically much older. Before I proceed to examine the current situation of
strong relativisation of the value-charged opposition between “minor” and “major”
literatures and the factors that shape it, let me offer a brief historical excursus
into the ambivalent self-positioning of the field of Slavic literary studies in the
long process of methodological re-scaling beyond the constraints of the national.
“Methodological nationalism” is not, of course, a panacea; it comes with its own
limitations;6 but it is a powerful and much-needed antidote to the increasingly
embarrassing — yet still vociferous — mantras of national literary historiography.
Slavic Philology, the disowned older relative of today’s “Russian and East
European Studies,” seemed well-placed some two centuries ago, at the time of its
first steps, to contribute to this celebration of cultural production beyond borders.
Most of the literatures it wanted to explore were after all the literatures of societies
without their own nation states. What is more, they were produced in the context
of bi- or multi-lingual empires, an environment that today attracts the attention of
anthropologists and sociologists embracing the transnational research paradigm. Yet
Slavic Philology, like most other European branches of philology (but in the end
for longer than most), followed a different course; it became a voluntary instrument
of national revivals and rivalries, often working with entities and labels larger than
the nation, only to reaffirm and enhance its — the nation’s — priority. The idea
of Slavdom, for example, was employed by many of the Russian Slavophiles and
pochvenniki as an imperial weapon of hegemony, or, in its Polish version, as a
justification and embodiment of messianic dreams. Ironically, the first outlines of
the idea of Slavdom were actually written in non-Slavic languages: the Dominican
monk Vinko Priboevich published in Venice in 1532 his De origine successibusque
Slavorum, followed by Mauro Urbini’s Il regno de gli Slavi (1601), a key-text for
the first Bulgarian history written in 1762, which signaled the onset of Bulgarian
nationalism.
The dynamics of this process is more complex than a brief survey could
suggest. Towards the end of the 19th century, with the Slavic nation-states in the
Balkans feeling more confident after successful completion of their long struggles
for independence and unification, the paradigm of kinship and superiority fuelled
by the notion of a Christian Slavdom began to compete with regional optics
allowing for cultural and religious variety, and even conflict. A good example of
this new perspective, insisting on diversity, was the growth of Balkan Studies. If
Viktor Zhirmunskii is correct, Balkan Studies (“balkanistika,” “Balkanistik”) made
its entrance as a discipline only in the late 1890s (more precisely, 1896-1898, in
Vols. 13 and 15 of Sbornik za narodni umotvoreniia, nauka i knizhnina, where
Ivan Shishmanov’s well-known study on The Song about the Dead Brother in the
Poetry of the Balkan Peoples was published).7 An adherent of the migration school
in the study of Folklore, Shishmanov believed in a freely floating body of motifs
that recognised no state borders. Although he never posed the crucial question
of subjectivity and agency — in the primeval anonymity of folklore, the rupture,
asymmetry, and estrangement accompanying the act of border-crossing was not an
issue — Shishmanov and the many scholars who followed in his steps refused to
assert the (by then customary) axiological distinction between “small” and “great
literatures.” Not by accident were these scholars more interested in folklore than
in literature per se, understood in the modern sense produced and implied by the
evaluative discriminations already in place by the late 19th century.
But this healthy preoccupation did not last. Local differences of intensity and
pace aside, after World War One and throughout the Soviet age, to some extent
even during the transition to the free market (in this respect, political caesurae did
not necessarily amount to paradigmatic shifts) writing literary history under the
umbrella of the nation state — even when this was done within the larger domain
of a communist commonwealth — became once again, in Bulgaria and in most
other Eastern European countries, a safe recipe for projecting one’s own literature
as suspiciously unique — which, in fact, was little else than the other side of
“minor,” “derivative,” “obscure,” “small.” Claiming a stake in European culture
meant claiming a well-guarded corner, a little patch of exclusive, unmatched and
unmatchable literary experience. The dislodgment of “minor” literature as an
evaluative paradigm could thus not occur before the gradual downfall of literary
history as a discourse sponsored by the nation state.
3
The receding significance of the nation state and the ensuing relativisation
of the distinction between “small” and “large” literatures are today driven by
modifications of the wider framework in which the practice of literary history takes
place. Understanding these modifications seems to me an essential first step. In
addition to the nation state (on which I dwell at more considerable length), below
I concentrate on two more factors (the media and the evolution of society and of
the idea and institutions of university education under the pressure of demographic
changes), and seek to elucidate and weigh their importance for the gradual waning
of the axiological matrix anchored in the opposition of “minor” and “major.”8
The Nation State
The origins of literary history as an institutionalized discourse are closely
interwoven with the fortunes of nationalism and the nation state after the French
Revolution. Although the first chairs of literature were conceived to teach and
profess the letters without particular national restrictions, the post-Napoleonic
period marked by the rise of nationalism in Europe saw a gradual transition towards
a nationally focused research and teaching agenda. Literature itself was seen as an
instrument of preserving and glorifying “those great national memories that are
in the dim past of a national history” (Schlegel 15) — and so was literary history.
As Cornis-Pope and Neubauer have recently argued,9 the study of literature and its
history was first institutionalized in societies that were concerned to cultivate a clear
national identity and gain state sovereignty (Germany, Italy, Central and Eastern
Europe) — although it would be true to say that in England, where statehood and
national identity had been established very early on, literary historiography took
off ahead of any such attempts in the countries mentioned above (Thomas Warton
published between 1774 and 1781 three volumes of his unfinished literary history,
only making it to the time of the Reformation).10 In Germany, the first literary
history appeared long before the unification of the country under Bismarck in 1871:
between 1835 and 1842, Georg Gervinus published a five-volume Geschichte
der poetischen Nationalliteratur der Deutschen (the title was later changed to
Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung); this was half a century earlier than the first
great history of French literature by Gustave Lanson which appeared in 1895.
In Italy, De Sanctis published a two-volume history of Italian literature in 1870-
71, after the unification of the country, but still twenty years ahead of Lanson.
Even though Gervinus did not agree with the politics by which Bismarck sought
to achieve the unification of Germany, his history was a powerful instrument in
constructing an awareness of German cultural homogeneity.
The future of this pattern that has enjoyed unquestioned domination for over
a century is now highly uncertain. There are several reasons for this. To start
with, Eurocentrism itself has been losing ground ever since World War I, and
with it also the European model of nation-centred literary history. This process
was exacerbated by the arrival of globalisation on the crest of revolutionary
discoveries in information technology in the 1950s, which coincided with the swift
dismantling of the colonial system. The ensuing growth of diasporic cultures,
on the one hand, and the process of European integration in the context of a
globalised economy, on the other, gave rise to occurrences best described as the
gradual “hollowing-out” of the nation state in the West. A single unified canon, on
which to base literary history, became increasingly untenable. Within the nationstate,
there emerged a string of parallel canons called upon to rectify the social
injustices of the past. For those willing to see it, there is at present a very strong
signal heralding the move away from national (literary) histories: the talk now,
especially in Germany, where Goethe had dreamt of a “world literature,” is of how
to construct a representative European canon, which would stimulate and draw on
the writing of regional histories or, ideally, of a history of European literature at
large. A joint French-German history textbook, written with the intention of being
used in schools in both countries was introduced to the public in 2007. Nor is this
pastime of the rich alone. Concerned with security and determined to see an ever
expanding market, the European Union and various NGOs compete in the Balkans
in sponsoring textbooks that are meant to teach the younger generations that they
all have a shared political and cultural history.11 Thus we face two developments,
none of which is hospitable to the traditional literary history commissioned by
the nation state (itself further enfeebled today by the drive to surrender ever more
power to enable Brussels to fire-fight the raging crisis of sovereign debt): either
regional, and even “pan-European” histories, serving a different set of political
goals from those so familiar from the recent past, or transnational, often also
transcontinental, narratives heeding not the monolithic projects of the nation state
but rather, as Stephen Greenblatt demands, the postcolonial processes of “exile,
emigration, wandering, contamination, and unexpected consequences, along
with the fierce compulsions of greed, longing, and restlessness, for — Greenblatt
continues — it is these disruptive forces that principally shape the history and
diffusion of languages, and not a rooted sense of cultural legitimacy.12 Needless to
say, Greenblatt’s message also carries the connotation of skepticism toward, and
critique of, the power aspects of conquest, mobility, and the hybrid proliferation
of national languages. But it asserts in no uncertain terms the superior viability of
cultural production based on such developments: moving beyond the straightjacket
of the nation-state, freeing up the potential of language to change as it wanders
across continents and social strata, letting language coin its own forms of existence
in exile, transition, and miscegenation.13
As traditional national literary history takes pains to remain in business, it
seeks to accommodate these new developments. A fresh example provides the
new Oxford English Literary History in 13 volumes, which will dedicate two
volumes to the post-World War II period, both designed to compete with, and
qualify, each other in the way they interpret Englishness: the volume 1960-2000:
The Last of England, written by Randall Stevenson, described as a “Scotsman who
believes that the idea of ‘English literature’ is no longer a possibility,” and another
volume, 1948-2000: The Internationalisation of English Literature, written by
the Canadian Bruce King who celebrates multiculturalism not as the end but as
a revival of this idea.14 (Note also that these two volumes interpret differently the
lower chronological boundary of the period they explore.) The new Oxford history
is thus seeking to transpose — without canceling — the largely exhausted national
narrative into the tonality of multicultural globalism.
With reference to Eastern Europe, it is only during the last twenty years
that we came to witness the manifestations (still sometimes ruptured, as I noted
earlier, by a resilient mentality of uniqueness and exclusivity) of a momentous
methodological superimposition, leading away from the postulates of a languagecentred
“methodological nationalism”: Slavic Philology began to share territory
and prestige with “Russian and East European Studies,” the latter being essentially
an area studies paradigm determined to reduce the specific weight of language
variety — and thus of literature as well — in the way the cultural production of
the post-Soviet era is studied and taught. Thus, historically, looking at Bulgarian
literature in particular, we can identify the succession (at times also the overlap)
of three particular optics: the Slavic (“slavistika”/“slavianska filologiia;”
“Slavistik”/“Slavische Philologie;” “Slavonic Studies”/ “Slavic Philology”), the
Balkan (“balkanistika”/”balkanski filologii;” “Balkanologie;” “Balkan Studies”),
and the East-European, or post-communist, paradigm (“Russian and East European
Studies”/ “South-East European Studies”). As one can readily see, the philological
element is on the wane; while the first, partly also the second, link of the chain
accommodate the philological component as fully expressive of the whole, the
third one no longer does. The trend observed in this succession is that of an ever
more overt political interest that attends to the literary aspects of literature only to
the extent to which they are representative of larger patterns of social and political
evolution. Evaluative judgments are more often than not demobilsed and suspended
in the process.
The Media
Marshall McLuhan’s assertion according to which the medium is the message
(23-36) regains resonance today as we try to chart the fortunes of literary history
and the impact on the previously entrenched but currently ever more shaky
distinction between “minor” and “major” literatures.
The business of literary history has changed dramatically over the last 60
years in large measure due to the changing media of its appropriation. There
are several aspects to this change. First of all, the pattern of the consumption of
literature underwent a significant alteration. Film adaptations of the national canons
abound, making it easy to delude oneself that watching Sense and Sensibility
exempts one from reading Jane Austin. The accessibility of the classics through
low-budget television versions gradually came to bridge the gap between high
and popular literature that the discipline of literary history has depended on all
along. To be sure, it was literary history in the first place that instituted the division
between “high” and “low,” and conjured works initially serialized in newspapers
for the entertainment (also for the edification, needless to say) of the wider reading
public into masterpieces of high culture. Many of the 19th century novels, including
those of Dostoevsky and Balzac, among others, were subject to such metamorphic
refashioning at the hands of academic literary historians in the decades following
their first publication. Now the table has been turned on the literary historian: the
plethora of films, radio adaptations, comics etc. has plunged the profession into a
world where the previous security furnished by the canon has all but vanished. The
supposedly unique act of the silent reading has been brutally ousted by the mass
consumption of visual surrogates perceived to be better at emphasizing the plot and
the costumes rather than the supposedly great philosophical message of the literary
work of art. Thus literary historians have been left wandering without a compass
in the thicket of a culture that is neither high nor low but subsists instead on the
reproducibility of the sacred in a myriad of everyday instances of overlapping
performance, profanation, and epiphany.
The second aspect is induced by the all-too-powerful presence of the
new electronic media. Ever since Baudrillard,15 we have learned to question
the boundary between fact and fiction in the workings of the electronic press.
Not only has literature ceased to be, in Hillis Miller’s nostalgic words, the sole
purveyor of virtual reality;16 moreover, modern media, in particular the interactive
technologies, have brought about an unprecedented openness of the text to
simultaneous modification by the recipient. Thus the status of the text has changed
beyond the comfortable manageability on which traditional literary history rests.
The disobedient text that emerges in the process of the electronic interaction is
open-ended, mobile as never before, and truly boundless; not even the conceptual
armament of intertextuality is any longer capable of domesticating it. An everfluid
hypertext renders the customary articulation of semantic entities obsolete and
unreliable. The result is an archive of semantically dynamic deposits, which can
be added to or subtracted from at liberty at any time. The author/reader boundary
is totally erased, and so are the foundations of reception theory and the traditional
literary history with its rigid value distinctions.
Finally, the global network creates a vast electronic library, where national
traditions and loyalties are quickly destabilized. Fragmentary in its foundations,
the experience of the internet-driven reader contributes to a new paradigm of
interpretation where reference and comparison no longer originate with compelling
logic from a historically verifiable pool of national writing. To make sense of a
story or a poem, both teachers and students of literature now often depend on
support from the global bank of plots and images that feeds the mind without
asking questions about the historical or national appropriateness of the material
supplied. The electronic media and the Internet thus confront literary history with
the challenges of simultaneity and deracination; they usher in a new age of a
labeled as “minor” or “major,” “great” or “inferior.” In this market, the nation-state
increasingly loses its power of canon-formation; moreover, the power of educating
and molding its own citizens in a fashion and through means that are controlled by
the nation-state also slips away.
Demographics
Habermas, among others, has recently asked the incommodious (to put it
mildly) question of “the future of human nature.”17 He placed this question in the
bedrock of modern genetics and the inevitable — and as yet unforeseeable —
changes that are to follow from the arrival of cloning and the genetic modification
of human material. From my standpoint, there are two interconnected issues at
stake here: longevity and memory. Both plunge the commentator into previously
unexplored depths. With an ever growing life expectancy and the corresponding
attempts at managing it through various economic and administrative techniques,
how is memory to be distributed socially? In the wake of the alterations dormant in
the management of longevity, how will the perception change of what constitutes
the formative experiences and segments of human life: childhood and adolescence?
Three of the essential cornerstones of literary history — indeed of any history —
will be heading for dramatic transformation. One is the concept of generation;
the other one is the notion of period; and the last one — the notion of novelness
(what constitutes novelty in the literary and ideological life of society), and thus
also the notion of value. Traditional literary history has been reliant on these
concepts to provide a meaningful centre of interpretation. It will not be enough to
realize that periods in literary and intellectual history are discursive ideological
constructs; so much is known even now. The real issue at stake is the changing
lifespan of generations, and with this the changing rhythms of the production of
meaning. Public consent over key events underlying the narrative of the historian
is likely to be reached in an ever more complicated and mediated fashion, because
the constitutive voices of the generational ensemble will each have a temporality,
duration, and therefore force, different from those informing the practice of
(literary) historiography at present. Whether microhistory or any other tools
favoured by modern historiography will be able to respond to these challenges
is far from certain. I do not wish to sound as the purveyor of mythology: it is
the realities of progress in genetics and the impending growth in longevity on a
previously unprecedented scale that urge us to rethink the foundations of (literary)
history in the future.
It is apposite here — and of a more immediate relevance for our study of the
fading opposition between “large” and “small,” “major” and “minor” literatures
— to stress that literary history has always been largely sustained by the generally
secure, at least in Europe, market of university and school education; without this
market, it is difficult to assume that literary history would be a viable enterprise
today. But what we see in recent years, precisely as part of the economic and social
techniques of demographic control, is the introduction of a totally new concept of
education. The so-called “continuing education,” or “life-long education,” which is
now part of the educational landscape throughout Europe and America, slowly but
securely redefines the philosophy of education, leaving behind the dogma of clearcut
disciplinarity. The pick-and-mix approach of the Western-style educational
supermarket is there to stay and to be employed in regular sequences throughout
the life of the individual. Having to serve this ever growing market, as well as the
modular system of undergraduate education, is already impacting on the scope of
research undertaken in the modern university. Thus we are witnessing a new cycle
of education and employment, which no longer separates the two, and a new social
task for education to live up to. All this contributes to a new climate of learning and
scholarship, in which authoritative knowledge and the guarding cult for particular
subjects and their inherent hierarchies of values and quality look increasingly
inadequate.18
4
Let me recapitulate my argument so far. The origins of literary history as an
institutionalized discourse are closely interwoven with the fortunes of nationalism
and the nation state after the French Revolution. However, Eurocentrism itself
has been losing ground since World War I, and with it also the European model
of nation-centred literary history. As the global economy undergoes today a
painful readjustment and, more importantly, a slow but seemingly unstoppable
rebalancing towards the new power-houses of growth in the Far East, on the
Indian Sub-Continent, and in Latin America, the very idea of a binding Euro-
North American literary canon, within which established notions of centre and
periphery remain meaningful, grows weaker and less tenable. Today we witness a
transition to either regional, and even “pan-European,” histories, serving a different
set of political goals from those so familiar from the recent past, or transnational
narratives heeding not the monolithic projects of the nation state, of which earlier
literary histories across Europe were representative, but rather the processes of
exile, emigration, creolisation, and the hybridization of languages.19 Regional
literary history, in particular, is beginning to occupy an ever more prominent
place, as it endeavours to heed and reveal the “ambiguities and overlaps” (Gellner)
in situations of plurilingualism and ethnic border-crossing concealed by the
centralized nation-state.20
The business of literary history has been transformed dramatically also by
the changing media of appropriating and consuming literature. First of all, the
pattern of the consumption of literature underwent a significant alteration, placing
the texts of the canon within easy reach through numerous visual adaptations,
thus destabilizing their very nature as canonic works of literature and erasing the
boundary between “high” and “popular.” Moreover, modern media, in particular
the interactive technologies, have brought about an unprecedented openness of
the text to simultaneous modification by the recipient. The status of the text has
changed beyond the comfortable manageability on which traditional literary history
rests. The disobedient text that emerges from the process of electronic interaction
is open-ended, mobile as never before, and truly boundless. Literature thus moves
freely between centre and periphery, enfeebling the conceptual framework posited
by these two notions. Not only from the point of view of transnational bordercrossing,
migration, and exile, but also from that of media theory has a clear
distinction between centre and periphery, between “minor” and “major” literary
texts become highly suspect. In the age of incessant transnational information flows
literature no longer has fixed abode or audience (in Ottmar Ette’s words, literature
has lost its “permanent address”21), nor does it any longer come with secure value
markers attached to it.
Crucially, all the factors I have discussed in this article, including the
dramatically changing ideas and practices of education, which put the sustainability
of the old disciplinary knowledge under such enormous strain, along with the
dwindling power of the nation-state to guard and inculcate the values of the
traditional canons, or to form new ones, seem to be pointing in the same direction:
the axiological discrimination between “small” and “great,” “minor” and “major”
literatures becomes increasingly untenable. As a matter of fact, this very distinction,
as I essayed to demonstrate, is itself a historical product with — as any other
time-bound product — a limited life-span: the distinction between “major” and
“minor” literatures was the outcome of an era of thriving national traditions and
strong nation states, but also — equally important — of a complacent Eurocentric
framework populated and propped by the contributory narratives of various artistic
isms, which, in their totality, constituted the coordinated space of the “republic of
letters,” apparently homogenous but below the surface built on cultural hierarchies
and ridden by conflicts, revolts, and struggles for international domination and
significance.22 To describe its map, the categories of centre and periphery, canon
and deviation, focus and margin were meaningfully employed. This conceptual
apparatus now looks increasingly challenged and enfeebled by the encounter
with a newly constituted transnational cultural process, in which evaluative
discriminations are ever more difficult to uphold. Instead, we are entering the
regime of a complex (and constant) marginocentricity,23 in which centre and
periphery become fluid, mobile, and provisional, prone to swapping their places
and exchanging cultural valences.
This is not to say that inequalities disappear; as a matter of fact, globalization
does create and reveal new sets of inequalities. But we need to begin to
acknowledge that, in the same breath, it renders the opposition between centre
and periphery less meaningful, as it moves away from the idea of a shared (Euro-
North American) canon that underpins this distinction in the first place. Rather,
we are witnessing a new regime of relevance where difference — drawn not least
from what we used to call the zones of cultural marginality — is commodified and
homogenized into a single, globally marketed cultural product;24 the defiant spirit
of marginality and “minor literatures” is processed away, leaving us with a new
stock of goods that change hands smoothly — at airports and, virtually, in a myriad
of chat-rooms.
Of course, it remains important to uncover the traces of that lost potentiality,
of the activist marginality that globalization tends to obliterate so insidiously. At
the same time we might be well-advised to admit that one of the most unpalatable
effects of globalization has indeed been to confront us with the reality of the minor
now functioning as a “fixed” feature, a reterritorialized appellation, a commodity
label. Alas, this new, static condition of ready-to-consume “minority” has very little
to do with the productive and challenging “becoming” that extracts “continuous
variation,” to recall Deleuze and Guattari’s later imperative. Instead, we are in the
grip of a regime of relevance that suspends the process of “becoming” and “installs
a new constant,”25 in which major and minor, canonical and marginal have only
limited conceptual validity.26
Notes
1. See Deleuze and Guattari (1986) and (1988: 106).
2. See Ani Ilkov’s poem “Edin zmei v Tsarigrad” (51).
3. See Ilkov’s poem “Otpad”tsi na edin zmei [(b) ‘Malarmeta’]” (54).
4. For earlier mentions of Bulgaria in the literatures of Western Europe, see Staitscheva.
5. Further details can be found in Traikov. For more on the dynamics and ideology of translating
Bulgarian literature in the West see Tihanov.
6. See Robert Fine’s critique in Fine (9-14).
7. See Aretov 65-7; on Shishmanov and the growth of Balkan Studies, see also Mishkova 67-70.
8. The following discussion draws partly on arguments developed in my article “The Future of
Literary History: Three Challenges in the 21st Century.” Primerjalna književnost 31.1 (2008): 65-
72 (Romanian translation: “Viitorul istoriei literare: trei provocari pentru secolul XXI.” Analele
Universitatii Bucuresti 57 (2008): 89-96; Slovene translation: “Prihodnost literarne zgodovine:
trije izzivi 21.stoletja.” Primerjalna književnost v 20. stoletju in Anton Ocvirk. Ed. Darko Dolinar
and Marko Juvan. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, ZRC SAZU, 2008. 325-32; Hungarian translation:
“Az irodalomtörténet jövője: Három kihívás a 21. században.” Korunk 23.2 (2012): 49-54.
9. See Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 12.
10. For a skeptical take, from a different perspective, on the argument in Cornis-Pope and
Neubauer, see Biti (75-6).
11. See e.g. the project for a shared textbook of Balkan history supported by the Pact for Stability,
as reported in Portalski.
12. See Greenblatt.
13. See also Greenblatt’s later take on cultural mobility in the opening and concluding essays to
Greenblatt.
14. Cf. Bate.
15. See above all Baudrillard’s notorious pamphlet The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
16. See Hillis Miller.
17. See Habermas.
18. For a wider picture of the methodological and civic anxieties of literary scholarship in the
twenty-first century, see most recently Alber et al. and Olsen and Pettersson.
19. On various new forms of hybridity in literature, see, for example, Sturm-Trigonakis and
Knauth.
20. Cf. Strutz (254), from whom I borrow some of the terminology here.
21. See the argument in Ette; the German original was published in 2001 under the title Literatur
in Bewegung. Raum und Dynamik grenzüberschreitenden Schreibens in Europa und Amerika.
22. See Casanova .
23. I extend and radicalise here the notion of marginocentricity applied by Marcel Cornis-Pope
to what he calls the ‘marginocentric cities’ of Eastern Europe; he defines ‘marginocentric cities’
as peripheral cities which display a “tendency to challenge the hegemony of the metropolitan
centers, offering an alternative to their national pull” (Cornis-Pope 8).
24. On the process I term ‘commodification of difference’, see also Tihanov.
25. The quoted words in this and the previous sentence are from Deleuze and Guattari (104).
26. I am grateful to Vladimir Biti and Henrike Schmidt for their helpful comments on an earlier
version of this essay.
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