Galin Tihanov – författare

The traditional view that the rise of Western theoretical thought in the 1960s and 1970s could be traced back to the Soviet 1920s, once accepted in Russia and the West alike because it directly associated the academic prestige of contemporary Western theory with the intellectual climate of post-revolutionary Russia, is increasingly challenged today. With the gradual retreat in recent years of theory from the high ground of the Western humanities, new work has emerged to suggest unexpected parallels and to undermine others.This book, with contributions from some of the most visible specialists in the field, re-examines the significant transfers, cross-fertilisations and synergies of cultural and literary theory between Russia and the West, from the 1920s through to the present day. It focuses primarily on those tendencies which have made the most significant contribution to critical theory over the last century, and looks ahead at the theoretical paradigms that are most likely to shape the future dialogue between Russia and the West in the humanities.

The traditional view that the rise of Western theoretical thought in the 1960s and 1970s could be traced back to the Soviet 1920s, once accepted in Russia and the West alike because it directly associated the academic prestige of contemporary Western theory with the intellectual climate of post-revolutionary Russia, is increasingly challenged today. With the gradual retreat in recent years of theory from the high ground of the Western humanities, new work has emerged to suggest unexpected parallels and to undermine others.This book, with contributions from some of the most visible specialists in the field, re-examines the significant transfers, cross-fertilisations and synergies of cultural and literary theory between Russia and the West, from the 1920s through to the present day. It focuses primarily on those tendencies which have made the most significant contribution to critical theory over the last century, and looks ahead at the theoretical paradigms that are most likely to shape the future dialogue between Russia and the West in the humanities.

Das Konzept der Weltliteratur ist über die Komparatistik hinaus zu einem grundlegenden Paradigma für die Erforschung der Literatur avanciert, das sich neben dem lange herrschenden nationalen etabliert hat. Die gerade durch neue literarische Entwicklungen komplexer gewordene Logik des Begriffs ‚Weltliteratur‘ reflektiert die verschiedenen Aspekte literarischer Internationalisierung. Sie verweist auch auf theoretische Differenzen, die zugleich eine historische und kulturelle Signatur haben und die deshalb nur komparativ-differenzierend  beschrieben werden können. In diesem Sinn stellt die Pluralität der Weltliteratur als Begriff wie als Sache den Ausgangspunkt der Überlegungen des Symposions dar, die sich als in einem starken Sinn vergleichend verstehen und dabei auch über die europäische Literatur und den europäischen Kontext hinausgehen.

This is the first volume to consistently examine Soviet engagement with world literature from multiple institutional and disciplinary perspectives: intellectual history, literary history and theory, comparative literature, translation studies, diaspora studies. Its emphasis is on the lessons one could learn from the Soviet attention to world literature; as such, the present volume makes a significant contribution to current debates on world literature beyond the field of Slavic and East European Studies and foregrounds the need to think of world literature pluralistically, in a manner that is not restricted by the agendas of Anglophone academe.