Galin Tihanov

This project critically examines some of the central assumptions and concepts informing the current discourse on world literature in the English-speaking world. Gali Tihanov is particularly interested in revealing the implications they hold for how we think and write the history/histories of world literature, reconstructing and highlighting alternatives drawn from discourses on world literature in 20th-century Eastern Europe (here Eastern Europe is broadly conceived as encompassing Central-East Europe and South-East Europe, though the project also touches upon developments in Russian non/heterodox Marxist literary theory and historiography). Tihanov’s methodology is grounded in intellectual history, including, but not confined to, discourse analysis and the study of institutions of knowledge production. During the IWM fellowship, Tihanov will be researching and writing a chapter of his book that focuses on Eastern European ideas of the historicity of world literature (exploring mostly Slovak, Hungarian, and Serbian material, but also German and Russian). There are three main questions that underpin this particular chapter: 1) How does one begin to conceptualize world literature historically, while accommodating its diversity and the fact that it has unfolded in cultural zones of different formation and unequal cultural and economic power; 2) Is there a specific Eastern European version of world literature that reflects the vantage point of what, linguistically speaking, may be seen as the literatures of small nations; 3) How has this perspective on world literature been affected by the multilingual and translingual realities of the region?