The History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries (review)

Abstract

Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, eds., The of Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in 19th and 20th Centuries Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, vol. 1, 2004, 647 pp.; vol. 2, 2005, 514 pp. The recently published two volumes of The of Literary Cultures of East Central Europe are part of University of Toronto Literary Project, initiated in 1996, with Mario J. Valdes and Linda Hutcheon as general editors. Collectively, volumes on East-Central European and Latin American cultures are intended to reform way history is conceived and written and to answer challenge of renewing theoretical models of studies by exploring concrete possibilities opened up by these challenges. (1) The very title--History of Literary Cultures, rather than a more traditional History of Literature--emphasizes broad transnational and sociopolitical direction of this enterprise, which from very beginning announces itself as a rewriting of exclusively aesthetic and formalist analyses of national literatures. The four volumes of East-Central European series, coordinated by Marcel Cornis Pope and John Neubauer, involve some 120 scholars and approximately 200 articles that seek to redesign profile of a region with fluctuating, multicultural, and plural identities. Implicitly polemicizing with both nationalistic and purely theoretical ways of representing region and its literature, Cornis-Pope and Neubauer seek to create a work that not only remaps a geographic space, but also challenges traditional categories of history, such as national literature and writers, national movements, history as a grand narrative, and literature as a .xed corpus of texts exemplified by canonical genres and clearly defined artistic movements. Instead, structure of four volumes is built around concepts such as temporal nodes, literary topographies, margino centric cities, nomadic figures, shifting genres, transnational/regional spaces, interfaces, and imaginary communities, to name just a few. A succinct semantic analysis of these concepts elucidates theoretical attempt of editors and contributors to generate a regionally specific and culturally diverse yet ethnically and formally comprehensive narrative of East-Central Europe. In this spirit, subchapters of two volumes focus on regional sites of cultural hybridization, defined by phenomena of cross-cultural interaction. Examples range from cultures of Danubian corridor to multicultural regions such as Transylvania, Balkans, various spaces inhabited by Jewish populations, and regional spaces of Galicia, Pannonia, Macedonia, and Istra. To this exercise in cultural topography, which emphasizes importance of border regions, geocultural corridors, and boundary transgressions, one can add other initiatives that challenge a traditional type of history no longer suitable for representing cross-cultural reality and understanding of region. One of most relevant means of decentralization is reflected in historical conception of project, which, far from following a linear, chronological scheme, embraces T. S. Eliot's theory of reversed tradition, which posits that really new work of art necessarily alters order of canon and thus establishes a kind of conformity between past and present. Using Eliot's principle that the past should be altered by present as much as present is directed by past, authors of consider cultures of East-Central Europe from a contemporary perspective, placing more importance on cross-cultural phenomena, which have defined entire area, instead of focusing on single figures and movements that might have impacted each culture of region singly. …