Literary History in Transnational Mode: The Challenges of Writing a History of East-Central European Literatures

Abstract

As Priscilla Wald notes in her comments on A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (2009), “Literary history is not at all a dead activity. Genres, like disciplines, are dynamic, as is the concept of the literary.” As she explains further, the guiding principle of A New Literary History of America is prismatic, assembling various disciplinary perspectives and offering a “carnival of style, voice, and topic.” The various chapters in it “function as individual vignettes, moments in time that readily form connections to other vignettes and help the reader see constellations among eras.”1 The prismatic, multicultural, and to some extent multimedia model of literary history that Wald describes has been applied in a few recent histories, including A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, edited by Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Anxo Abuin Gonzalez, and Cesar Dominguez, and History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe which I coedited with John Neubauer.2 The latter work, published in four volumes between 2004 and 2010, attempts a comprehensive transnational study of the cultural and literary region that stretches from the Baltic countries to Bulgaria and Albania and from Ukraine and Moldova in the east to the Czech Republic in the west. Representing the joint work of more than 120 contributors from Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia, this project, sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, is not a chronological narrative, but an experiment in writing literary history that acknowledges ruptures as well as transnational connections. Hence the project’s subtitle: Conjunctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries.