Ivana Perica – författare

Drawing on a global history of politicized writing, this book explores literature’s utility as a mode of activism and aesthetic engagement with the political challenges of the current moment.The question of literature’s ‘uses’ has recently become a key topic of academic and public debate. Paradoxically, however, these conversations often tend to bypass the rich history of engagements with literature’s distinctly political uses that form such a powerful current of 20th- and 21st-century artistic production and critical-theoretical reflection. The Political Uses of Literature reopens discussion of literature’s political and activist genealogies along several interrelated lines: As a foundational moment, it draws attention to the important body of interwar politicized literature and to debates about literature’s ability to intervene in social reality. It then traces the mobilization of related conversations and artistic practices across several historical conjunctures, most notably the committed literature of the 1960s and our own present. In mapping out these geographically and artistically diverse traditions – including case studies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, India and Russia – contributors advance critical discussions in the field, making questions pertaining to politicized art newly compelling to a broader and more diverse readership. Most importantly, this volume insists on the need to think about literature’s political uses today – at a time when it has become increasingly difficult to imagine any kind of political efficacy for art, even as the need to do so is growing more and more acute. Literature may not proffer easy answers to our political problems, but as this collection suggests, the writing of the 20th century holds out aesthetic resources for a renewed engagement with the dilemmas that face us now.

Drawing on a global history of politicized writing, this book explores literature's utility as a mode of activism and aesthetic engagement with the political challenges of the current moment.The question of literature's 'uses' has recently become a key topic of academic and public debate. Paradoxically, however, these conversations often tend to bypass the rich history of engagements with literature's distinctly political uses that form such a powerful current of 20th- and 21st-century artistic production and critical-theoretical reflection. The Political Uses of Literature reopens discussion of literature's political and activist genealogies along several interrelated lines: As a foundational moment, it draws attention to the important body of interwar politicized literature and to debates about literature's ability to intervene in social reality. It then traces the mobilization of related conversations and artistic practices across several historical conjunctures, most notably the committed literature of the 1960s and our own present. In mapping out these geographically and artistically diverse traditions – including case studies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, India and Russia – contributors advance critical discussions in the field, making questions pertaining to politicized art newly compelling to a broader and more diverse readership. Most importantly, this volume insists on the need to think about literature's political uses today – at a time when it has become increasingly difficult to imagine any kind of political efficacy for art, even as the need to do so is growing more and more acute. Literature may not proffer easy answers to our political problems, but as this collection suggests, the writing of the 20th century holds out aesthetic resources for a renewed engagement with the dilemmas that face us now.

Drawing on a global history of politicized writing, this book explores literature's utility as a mode of activism and aesthetic engagement with the political challenges of the current moment.The question of literature's 'uses' has recently become a key topic of academic and public debate. Paradoxically, however, these conversations often tend to bypass the rich history of engagements with literature's distinctly political uses that form such a powerful current of 20th- and 21st-century artistic production and critical-theoretical reflection. The Political Uses of Literature reopens discussion of literature's political and activist genealogies along several interrelated lines: As a foundational moment, it draws attention to the important body of interwar politicized literature and to debates about literature's ability to intervene in social reality. It then traces the mobilization of related conversations and artistic practices across several historical conjunctures, most notably the committed literature of the 1960s and our own present. In mapping out these geographically and artistically diverse traditions – including case studies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, India and Russia – contributors advance critical discussions in the field, making questions pertaining to politicized art newly compelling to a broader and more diverse readership. Most importantly, this volume insists on the need to think about literature's political uses today – at a time when it has become increasingly difficult to imagine any kind of political efficacy for art, even as the need to do so is growing more and more acute. Literature may not proffer easy answers to our political problems, but as this collection suggests, the writing of the 20th century holds out aesthetic resources for a renewed engagement with the dilemmas that face us now.

Drawing on a global history of politicized writing, this book explores literature’s utility as a mode of activism and aesthetic engagement with the political challenges of the current moment.The question of literature’s ‘uses’ has recently become a key topic of academic and public debate. Paradoxically, however, these conversations often tend to bypass the rich history of engagements with literature’s distinctly political uses that form such a powerful current of 20th- and 21st-century artistic production and critical-theoretical reflection. The Political Uses of Literature reopens discussion of literature’s political and activist genealogies along several interrelated lines: As a foundational moment, it draws attention to the important body of interwar politicized literature and to debates about literature’s ability to intervene in social reality. It then traces the mobilization of related conversations and artistic practices across several historical conjunctures, most notably the committed literature of the 1960s and our own present. In mapping out these geographically and artistically diverse traditions – including case studies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, India and Russia – contributors advance critical discussions in the field, making questions pertaining to politicized art newly compelling to a broader and more diverse readership. Most importantly, this volume insists on the need to think about literature’s political uses today – at a time when it has become increasingly difficult to imagine any kind of political efficacy for art, even as the need to do so is growing more and more acute. Literature may not proffer easy answers to our political problems, but as this collection suggests, the writing of the 20th century holds out aesthetic resources for a renewed engagement with the dilemmas that face us now.

This volume explores the state of literary theory today, decades after the repeatedly proclaimed end of theory. It builds on the idea that theory is historically constituted as it is “always becoming something else” as Leslie Fiedler claimed in the 1950s, arguing that the historical constitution of theory relies on theory’s procedural nature. In order to assess theory’s procedural challenge to the fundamental notions that all the disciplines within an episteme have brought to the fore, it addresses these questions: What are the procedures theory has relied on? Are they a secret to its resistance, or is resistance its primary procedure? And if so, a resistance to what? Secondly, if resistance were theory’s principal vehicle, at which point does resistance, conceptualized only procedurally (as resisting something, questioning anything, criticizing whatever), display hallmarks of a disciplinary closure that must call for new resistances, and perhapsfor a fundamentally another kind? The book turns to what theory does in order to avoid a partial answer to what theory is.

This volume explores the state of literary theory today, decades after the repeatedly proclaimed end of theory. It builds on the idea that theory is historically constituted as it is “always becoming something else” as Leslie Fiedler claimed in the 1950s, arguing that the historical constitution of theory relies on theory’s procedural nature. In order to assess theory’s procedural challenge to the fundamental notions that all the disciplines within an episteme have brought to the fore, it addresses these questions: What are the procedures theory has relied on? Are they a secret to its resistance, or is resistance its primary procedure? And if so, a resistance to what? Secondly, if resistance were theory’s principal vehicle, at which point does resistance, conceptualized only procedurally (as resisting something, questioning anything, criticizing whatever), display hallmarks of a disciplinary closure that must call for new resistances, and perhapsfor a fundamentally another kind? The book turns to what theory does in order to avoid a partial answer to what theory is.

At a time when the rule of law is being reshaped and, in certain respects, even severely distorted, this volume examines the ways in which literature both legitimises the principles underlying the present rule of law and anticipates assumptions that take shape before new ideas are publicly felt or articulated within legal discourse. Literary acts of agency thus contribute to a reconfi guration of the legal sphere, advancing arguments through an aesthetic form that remains closely connected to broader social and cultural practices. Rather than approaching literature merely as a vehicle of ruling ideology or as a moral signpost for future legal developments, this volume considers how literary texts negotiate the interval between the rule of law as an ideal and how it is enacted in practice.

Offers an alternate framing of the literary and political afterlives of revolution between 1928-1968 in Eastern and Western Europe.Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur combines the transfer of ideas between historical turning points with a comparative reading of political literatures in the European East and West to address the disparity between the abundance of scholarly accounts of 1968 and the simultaneous forgetting of developments in the interwar period that peaked around 1928. It deepens scholarly awareness of the transnational spaces of interwar literature and explores their afterlives in the post-World War II period.The book troubles and corrects Western European theories of 1968 by tracing the post-war afterlives of shared interwar experiences that point towards a socialist third way, or Georg Lukács’ tertium datur, and thus out of the conventionally understood East-West binary. It testifies to the existence of a literature that throughout the last century self-consciously oscillated between the exigencies of organized politics and the aesthetic task of helping to shape the humanity of tomorrow.Examining case studies of works by Bertolt Brecht, Ivan Olbracht and August Cesarec among others, Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur excavates a series of problems, optics and styles characteristic of the forgotten episodes of 20th-century literary history. It shows that the proverbial Iron Curtain was not impenetrable, and that the walls and borders erected in the post-war period could not completely suppress the reverberations and revival of projects that flourished in the political-literary metropolises of the interwar period.