kamelia spassova
The Return to/of Theory
I
n the prologue to The Birth and Death of Literary Theory:
Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond, Galin Tihanov formulates the
major questions of his study as “what happens once literary theory is no
more, [and] how can one capture its elusively seminal afterlives?” (1). These
questions are driven by his belief that literary theory’s proper “regime of
relevance”1 has been replaced by, as he reiterates in his epilogue, a novel
“regime of relevance that thinks literature through its market and entertainment value,” engendering “an interpretative framework that has recently
grown and gained enormous popularity, not least in the classroom, as ‘world
literature’ ” (175). Tihanov’s vision of literary theory’s being “no more” and
his search for its dispersed “afterlives” in the new interpretative framework
of world literature raises a host of questions:2 How should we reflect on the
encounter and confrontation between modern literary theory and present
debates about “world literature”—in terms of continuity or discontinuity; as a
survival legacy or oblivion; as a shared epistemic framework or a paradigm
shift? Does the birth of world literature rely and insist on the death of literary
theory? What is Tihanov’s book not about? What has been left aside and why?
Volume 32, Number 1
doi 10.1215/10407391-8956960
© 2021 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
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I attempt to answer these questions in a montage of three heterogeneous parts. The first part tries to follow the basic argument of the method
of radical historicity by considering how epistemes are chronotopically
shaped and what social conditions underlie them. This query narrows down
to the dependency of theory on literary examples. In what follows, I turn to
François Hartog’s idea of regimes of historicity in order to show how crises
of time—discontinuities and ruptures in temporality—are a constitutive part
of the idea of history. The paradoxical figure of “discontinuous continuity”
addresses the central issue of recognized and unrecognized legacies, leading to the realization that the rupture between literary theory and “world
literature” is not only a discontinuation but also a continuity.
The second part of my essay opens a map of the past, more specifically, the past preceding the birth of literary theory. The humanistic tradition of philology is not explored by Tihanov; it is one of the discourses he
leaves aside. It is not ignored, however, by the discourse of world literature,
which appropriates the work of Erich Auerbach and of Goethe and the project
of philology in new neoliberal terms, while leaving Russian literary theory
out of the picture. Tihanov endeavors to restore the “dissipated” legacy of
Russian literary theory by focusing on the work of Viktor Shklovsky and
Mikhail Bakhtin, while leaving out Roman Jakobson. According to Tihanov,
Jakobson’s “linguistic fundamentalism”—insisting as it does on the original
language of the literary work and its untranslatability (see Kalinova)—is
foreign to the contemporary scene, with its emphasis on translatability. By
connecting the legacy of philology to a “slow reading” of Jakobson’s article
“On Realism in Art,” the third part of my essay outlines the possibility for
a return to philology that does not preclude a return to theory; in fact, it
facilitates it.
Literature Comes First: The Poetics of Examples
What touching examples of faithful servants giving themselves up to danger
and death for their masters?
—Goethe
Announcing the death of theory is neither a traumatic nor an
elegiac gesture for Tihanov’s radical historicity; it is something beyond both
enthusiasm and anxiety. His approach is radical because it has the courage
to outline the precise boundaries marking the birth and death of modern
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literary theory, which thus acquires a precise chronotopical shape. The
Foucauldian premise here is that each discursive formation functions within
certain social conditions. Hence there can be no such thing as timelessness
in literature or in literary theory; there is only the threat of a naturalization
of a historical perspective. Discussing Bakhtin’s legacy in what he sees as the
new framework of the Anglo-Saxon discourse of world literature, Tihanov
evokes the eventual death not only of theory but of classic literature as well:
“We know by now that ‘great literature’ is a historically attestable category
that has both a birth and an expiry date” (“Ferrying”). I believe the figure of
the end has constructive potential for drawing attention to the time-limited
dimensions of each episteme, or its context-dependent design. The figure of
the end opens up the question of legacy, allowing retrospective reflections
on the effects of the early stage of literary theory on our contemporary situation—the recognized as well as the forgotten episodes.
Although not explicitly discussed in the book, we might keep in
mind the title of Hans Robert Jauss’s 1967 inaugural lecture “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory.” In it, Jauss contends that the aim
of literary history is to bridge the gap between historical knowledge and
aesthetics (7). Tihanov’s book draws on this gap, constructing and subverting
the foundational narratives of literary theory. Radical historicity is a challenge to literary theory, a daring proposal to rethink its genesis, its legacies,
and its possible regimes of (ir)relevance.
Literary theory, as captured by Tihanov, is not completely independent; it is coupled with or subordinated to literature itself. The task of
defining theory starts with the very definition of literature. Related to this,
theory is shaped by its own historicity, its paradigm shifts and critical thresholds that rely on changes within the axis of time. Russian formalism is embedded within the context of Russian futurism, the Prague Linguistic Circle is
entwined with Czechoslovakian surrealism, Bakhtin and Olga Freidenberg
are seen through the prism of premodern folklore and marginal genres.
Thus Tihanov pairs “substantive parallels between intellectual and artistic
developments in Russia, Germany, and Eastern and Central Europe” (Birth 5).
This coupling between theory and literature is the first important condition
for a theory whose metalayers are not universal meditations, but are instead
grounded in concrete literary examples and their historical environments.
The bond between a particular literary theory and a particular
work of art can be explored in terms of the poetics of example and the three
major modes of exemplification this poetics involves: generalization, interpretation, and paradigmatization.3 Generalization excludes superfluous
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details and subordinates the work of art to the logic of abstraction and
reduction. It is a deductive way of illustrating from above. Interpretation,
with its hermeneutic background, is a reading practice on the level of the
literary work per se. Its strategy navigates the balance between lucidity
and opacity, simplicity and ambiguity, as it has the capacity to reveal hidden, diminished, or forgotten aspects at the price of obscuring others. The
third mode establishes a perfect link between literary theory and literature.
Binding the conceptual and the concrete levels, it makes possible the paradigmatic singularity that possesses the capacity to govern its own modes
of relevance (Agamben). The paradigmatic method—neither induction, nor
deduction—does not treat the literary work reductively. Rather, it endows the
work with the status of an event that exhibits itself as an exceptional case.
This third mode is thus capable of producing paradigm shifts: it can bring
about a hybridization between the core and the periphery of the work and
cause a cultural “explosion” (vzryv), to use Lotman’s term,4 by using the
“revolutionary potential of poetic language” (Kristeva, Revolution).5 Following the logic of examples, Tihanov is especially meticulous in showing
what kind of literary examples were used by different scholars: examples
can reveal different stories and hidden dynamics. As Goethe puts it, let us
be guided “according to his theory and his example” (306). The genealogical
connection between Russian theory and Romanticism is grounded in the
central thesis of literature’s autonomous status, but it is also based on the
paradigmatic reading of Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov made
by the Russian formalists; Shklovsky’s reflection on Novalis; and Jakobson’s
credit to Fedor Buslaev and the Romantic tradition (Tihanov, Birth 19).
Tihanov’s elegant definition of world literature highlights its
hidden energies: its concealed revolutionary layers and its dynamic aspects.
“[W]orld literature functions as a historically shifting constellation of discourses that is chronotopically constructed, with social and ideological
energies bubbling underneath and shaping this construct” (“Location”
478–79). This definition could easily be attributed to literary theory as well.
The task of radical historicity and its discourse on theory is to reveal series
of recontextualizations, to recall what has been forgotten, to give shape to
hidden energies and forces, and to follow uncanny afterlives of the extinct.6
Moreover, its implicit premise is that attributing a proper beginning and a
clear end to a form or structure facilitates the narrative of their existence,
with its diverse plotlines. Marking distinctive points (departure and dissolution) in terms of space and time could prove quite useful for the process of
uncovering hidden ideological and intellectual forces at work.
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The limits of Tihanov’s epistemological project, outlined by the
concept of regime of relevance, are implied by the etymology of the word
regime. It derives from Latin, meaning “diet,” but also “the act of governing
self and others.” Thus, the very word regime has provided us with a Foucauldian interpretative key. In the famous article “What Is an Author,” Michel
Foucault reflects on Samuel Beckett’s question: “[W]hat does it matter who
is speaking?” and suggests a reversal of the tradition—a shift from author
to discourse. He analyzes the author function as a historical construct,
a technology to exercise different types of power over discourses: “[T]he
author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of
signification” (118). Tihanov uses the idea of regime of relevance in an early
article in Bulgarian exploring the concept of the author as historically situated. After Foucault, he explores the function of the author, with its power to
organize and control knowledge (“Literary” 28). Thus, the author’s multiple
regimes of relevance raise a question about what Foucault describes as “the
founders of discursivity” (“What” 114); he points out that the founders of
modernity are Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. In a similar manner, Tihanov
in his most recent book identifies the founders of modern literary theory as
Shklovsky, Bakhtin and Jakobson. The regimes of relevance of literature
change in conjunction with the shifting status of the author: the Romantic
genius governed literature in the nineteenth century, the autonomous literariness of the work prevailed in the beginning of the twentieth century,
and the market dominates today.
Tihanov situates modern literary theory in Russia and Eastern
Europe during the interwar period. Its specificity requires its emancipation
from the discourses of aesthetics and philosophy (mainly Marxism, phenomenology, and neo-Kantianism) and is grounded in the autonomy of literature.
Within the paradigm of literary theory, “language and its peregrinations
are a major protagonist” (Tihanov, Birth 7). Before the birth of theory, the
protagonist was the author; after its death, the market is ascendent. Thus
the discourse of theory is defined by a terminus post quem and a terminus
ante quem and is situated between Shklovsky’s “resurrection of the word”
of 1914 and Juri Lotman’s death in 1993. The previous regime, that of the
Romantic paradigm (1813–1913), gave birth to a rethinking of literature as an
autonomous discourse, which it achieved by conceiving of the author as an
outcast, madman, genius, parrhesiastes, or some other figure of exemplary
exception. Tihanov takes into consideration the prehistory of modern literary theory in the Romantic tradition while marking the rise of nationalism
and national canons, the comparative principle, and the exceptionality of the
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authorial figure as specific features of Romanticism. The regime of relevance
of literary theory, with its emphasis on literariness, the literary device, and
the materiality of language, is hence situated between Romanticism and the
Anglo-Saxon liberal episteme of world literature that is dominant today. In
Tihanov’s book, consequently, modern literary theory as a distinct epistemological object is defined not only by the dates of its birth and death but also
by its past and its future, that is, by its Romantic prehistory (the antecedent
paradigm) and its world literature afterlives (the subsequent paradigm).
One of the epistemological effects of this approach is to open up
the legacy of Russian formalism and the very origin of literary theory to
contemporary debates on world literature. As things stand at present, the
seminal bond between literary theory and literature is severed with the
paradigm shift effected by the contemporary regime. The prevailing discourse of world literature regards the work of art mainly as a tool of global
politics, cultural exchange, and perfect translatability. The importance
of literature as an art form is rendered irrelevant in this perspective. By
turning to certain neglected ideas of the early stages of theory, Tihanov
asserts a view of world literature that is both more comprehensive in time
and space and more nuanced in its approach to literary art. Summoning
the long shadows of Shklovsky, Jakobson, Bakhtin, Roman Ingarden, and
Lukács (to name a few of the book’s protagonists), Tihanov proposes a way
of taking advantage of the situation and opening up future trajectories for
world literature as well as its theoretical background.
The three paradigms with their respective modes of reflection—
Romanticism, literary theory, world literature—provoke some questions.
Do different regimes of relevance depend on different forms of temporality,
which demonstrate the lack of unilinear history? Is the concept of the regime
of relevance thus revealed to be inconsistent, discrepant, driven by divergent
experiences of time? At this point, it is worth evoking the concept of “regime
of historicity” as it was developed by François Hartog. Drawing on Reinhart
Koselleck, Hartog differentiates three regimes of historicity: the premodern
regime; the modern regime, involving national histories after 1789; and the
rise of presentism after 1989. This differentiation allows the investigation
of the plurality of temporal orders and discontinuities in history (Hartog).
How do different regimes of relevance intersect and merge with different
regimes of historicity, thus establishing an unpredictable hybridization
of “regimes within regimes” (Nikolchina)? Is it possible for the dominant
regime to be subverted and undermined by the latent intellectual forces of
subjects faithful to the past event (Badiou 41–42)? Does literary theory have
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the potential to reorder or to reconceptualize the contemporary project of
world literature? How do we reflect on ruptures, discontinuities, and the
demise of epistemes? How might the logic of continuity and discontinuity
be organized within the narratives of intellectual history? How do we think
grosso modo about history after Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin, or
after Foucault and the figure of “discontinuous continuity” (Heller-Roazen
145)? A possible answer involves a history constituted by a series of breaks,
gaps, lacks, and caesuras. With this in mind, it is better not to rush into
conclusions but to take a step back in time. I intend to return to a crucial
historical rupture that happened before the birth of literary theory and
involves an old-fashioned mode of reflection on literature.
The Task of the Mature Philologist: Festina Lente
People in general think that philology
is at an end—while I believe that it has
not yet begun.
—Nietzsche
Tihanov’s methodological apparatus invites us to think through
a narrative that is parallel to literary theory but that also affects its fate.
The story is about an academic discipline that is dominant throughout the
nineteenth century and whose main domain is, as with literary theory,
language, so the birth of modern theory contests its terrain.7 The story is
about philology: not the formal Hellenistic type (organized by the principle of
grammatical structures), but the historical type (organized by the principle
of process and change) that determined the logic of comparative literature,
established the dynamics between ancient and modern, built the national
canons, and opened the horizons beyond them. The narrative about the birth
and death of philology could be situated in Germany between Friedrich
August Wolf and Nietzsche (Efal 1–14; Gildenhard; Holquist; Pollock, Introduction). In 1777, Wolf began his studies at the University of Göttingen, where
he insisted on obtaining a diploma as a studiosus philologiae although at the
time there existed no proper philological department there. Wolf’s act of selfannouncement and his institutional graduation as a philologist marks the
birth of classical philology and the establishing of its autonomy. Nietzsche,
on the other hand, is fond of marking ends. Approximately a century later
in 1879, after having become—at the age of twenty-four—the youngest chair
of classical philology ever, he gave up on philology and chose the role of a
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philosopher. The interesting question here is why Tihanov does not reflect
on the clash between philology and theory as part of the emancipation of
the new regime of discursive autonomy. It is important to keep track of the
historical perspectives Tihanov includes in his account of the birth and
death of literary theory, but it is perhaps even more telling to take into consideration the discourses that have been left out.
Apart from the American traditions of close reading and distant
reading, we can think about the practices of slow reading or the stakes of
the philological longue durée. Modern and Alexandrian philologists share
the same passion for slow reading, for categorizing, editing, and reinventing
the past, for diving into the depths of always fragmented legacies of writing
on papyruses, parchments, printed paper, or digital books. This presupposes
meeting the past neither as monumental nor as antiquarian history, but as
a reflection on the restless contemporary horizon and as a critical form of
questioning the present (Nietzsche, On the Advantage). Since philologists
by default live simultaneously in two different times, they have to serve two
different contexts in at least two different languages. The philologist’s merit
is in dealing with heterogeneity, with the controversial dynamics of old and
new, of classical and Christian, of canonical and peripheral, of ancient and
modern languages. In contrast to world literature, the recognition of incommensurability underlies the very concept of comparative literature: there is
always something untranslatable, something radically different, something
inaccessible to any known matrix.8 The awareness of this rupture of times,
contexts, and languages insists on the element of “an invention (Erfindung),
a sleight-of-hand, an artifice (Kunststück), a secret formula” that should
bridge the time gap through an interpretation or a conceptualization (Foucault, “Nietzsche” 141).
Including the fate of philology on the map sheds light on some
implicit trajectories in the narrative of The Birth and Death of Literary
Theory. The modal disparities between formalism and Marxism in the twenties and thirties, around which the book is organized, are predated by the
clash between philology and theory. Tihanov features the prominent role
of German-Jewish philologists between the wars and the invention of the
modern history of literature: “[M]odern comparative literature begins life
in exile, with the Istanbul works of Auerbach and Spitzer and their postwar
continuation in the United States” (Birth 13). All the premises for the birth
of modern literary theory are present in the work of Auerbach, Leo Spitzer,
Ernst Robert Curtius, and Karl Voßler:9 exile, heterocultural environment,
heteroglossia, and the transformation of the philosophical metadiscourses.10
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Tihanov notes that he will not proceed in this direction because a lot of
research has already been done on the topic (188); however, there is more
here than meets the eye. Going back to the problem of exemplification, as
discussed above, the devil is in the examples. References, quotations, and
illustrations can transport invisible intellectual forces. Tihanov refers to
David Damrosch’s 1995 “Auerbach in Exile,” considered a point of departure
for the third regime of relevance, that is, as marking the precise moment in
which the neoliberal discourse of world literature started gaining power.
This fact could explain the overexposure of the topic “Auerbach in exile” for
the past twenty years as Auerbach has been recognized as the true ancestor of world literature discourse. His essay “The Philology of World Literature” (1952), where the future of these disciplines is being discussed, can
be regarded as the most direct connection between the German philologist
and current developments.
Yet there are also substantial differences between Auerbach’s
concept of Weltliteratur and contemporary attempts to return to philology
and world literature. In contrast to Damrosch’s project, Auerbach’s pattern of thought is deeply rooted in the humanistic tradition and indebted
to Giambattista Vico as precursor of historical relativism and of philology
as a new science, and to German Romanticism and Hegel (Auerbach, “Epilegomena” 15, “Giambattista,” and “Vico”). Auerbach predicted that “the
notion of Weltliteratur would be at once realized and destroyed” (“Philology”
3). The simultaneous processes of homogenization and standardization,
driven by the European-American and Russian-Bolshevist domination,
would lead to a world literature, realized in “a single literary language”
without historical diversity. As it turns out, the last paradigm shift both
realized and discontinued Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur.11 It dissociated itself from the anachronistic legacy of the individual-Bildung as an
aesthetic and political program. Today’s Anglo-Saxon regime of relevance
is dominated by the idea that literature is a mode of reading and circulation
in translation, predominantly in English.12 It strictly sets itself apart from
Auerbach’s attempt to save language diversity, including classic languages
as the foundation of European philology. All this is, as Tihanov points
out, well known. But while Auerbach is overexposed today, some of his
ideas (humanistic values, historical relativism, multiplicity of languages)
are being replaced and abandoned. At the price of a reductive reading—or
indeed, a misreading—of his work, Tihanov grants Auerbach the role of
mediator between the national-based comparative studies of the nineteenth
century and the present market-based adaptation of literature in terms of
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globalization, transnationalism, and translation—the accelerated perpetual
flow of information and capital.13
Tihanov’s return to the prominent role of literary theory in
Russia and Eastern Europe can be regarded as a response to this simplified narrative and as a move that allows insight into the legacy we carry
and the legacy we forget. He prefers to undertake a return to theory rather
than a return to philology.14 Literary theory gains its autonomous regime
of relevance when it is neither philosophy nor philology, and yet both disciplines continue to disturb its epistemic boundaries. In the cluster of literary studies, the separation between theory and philology was part of the
process of emancipation through which theory acquired its methodological
power and specific techniques. Nineteenth-century historical philology, with
its roots in the humanities, relies on the concept of the individual and on
rational control. Nietzsche, as the last philologist, discontinues this tradition and opens another critical episteme. Tihanov points out the pivotal role
of Foucault in this agency shift—from author to discourse: “All discourses,
whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which
they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur”
(“What” 119–20).15 In The Birth and Death of Literary Theory this “anonymity
of a murmur” is recognized in the experience of the Russian formalists. No
longer is the individualism of the author important (the general framework
of the human sciences is abandoned in the past): “Formalism insisted that
the writer is unseated from her writing desk by forces that are perhaps not
transparent to her, but nevertheless totally amenable to scientific study and
rationalization: what governs her work are the intrinsic laws of plot, device,
rhyme, and rhythm” (32).16 Shklovsky and his circle gave us an earlier version of this approach to literature that goes beyond authorial agency and
by far predates the Foucauldian turn. On a metalevel, Tihanov recalls the
larger paradigm of literary history without names, “driven by anonymous
discursive powers stronger than the individual writer” (28). Chapter by
chapter, he traces how the idea of history without names was embraced by
formalism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, Bakhtin, and semantic paleontology.
Literary theory is no longer wholly grounded in the humanistic
tradition because it appropriates the methods of the strict sciences. It goes
beyond Wilhelm Dilthey’s division of Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften, refusing to be classified as a humanistic discipline. It decisively
displaces the methods of nation-based philology by revising the heterotopic
territory between the host and foreign languages. In addition, among the
scientific tools that can be used in literature, it includes models developed
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by logic, information sciences, physics, and mathematics.17 These models
aim to develop new methods and vocabulary in order to reach beyond the
desk of the author toward the inner microstructures, forms, and phonemic
patterns in the literary work.
The ambivalent dynamic (antagonistic and yet complementary)
between theory and philology materializes in the curious attribution to
Jakobson of Nietzsche’s definition of philology as the art of slow reading
by Calvert Watkins and Sheldon Pollock. In his 1886 preface to Daybreak,
Nietzsche has not completely divorced philology: “[P]erhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading. [ . . . ] [T]o go aside, to take
time, to become still, to become slow—it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and
achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento” (5). The very same sentence
is attributed to the Russian theorist: “[T]he definition of philology that my
teacher Roman Jakobson gave (who got it from his teacher, who got it from
his): ‘Philology is the art of reading slowly’ ” (Watkins 25).18 The American
Indologist, Pollock, in addressing the new world philology,19 recognizes
Nietzsche’s phrase in Jakobson’s definition and then notes that Jakobson
was “a major figure in the twentieth-century twilight, [ . . . ] a ‘Russian
philologist,’ as he described himself” (“Future” 933). Is Jakobson a Russian
philologist, a Slavicist, or is he a literary theorist who is taking part in the
process of “the exchange of ideas between metropolitan and émigré Russian culture” (Tihanov, Birth 12)? Nikola Georgiev, one of the most brilliant
intellectuals during the communist regime in Bulgaria, cited Jakobson’s
self-identification as philologus sum (100).20 The Bulgarian theorist expands
this definition by paraphrasing Terence: philologus sum, philologie nihil
a me alienum puto (I am a philologist, and I think nothing philological is
alien to me). My point here is that there is a perspective in which theory and
philology are not in conflict and do not contradict each other but, rather,
mutually enhance their power. The return to theory is a sort of synecdoche
for the return to philology. Although certain humanist values are set aside
and individual authors have lost their status, some philological techniques
are being recharged by theory. In many aspects Auerbach’s slow reading
of literary works in their original tongue stands a lot closer to Jakobson’s
approach than the discourse of world literature might expect. Tihanov’s
book comes to show that these intellectual trajectories are more complex
because what happens between philology and today’s world literature is
nothing short of the birth, the death, and the return (?) of theory.
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In order to rethink critically the concept of world literature as
a contradictive construct together with its specific ideological sublayers,
Tihanov elaborates an epistemological grid of “four major reference points:
time, space, language, and, crucially, what one could term self-reflexivity”
(“Location” 468). He underscores the possibility of addressing the concept
in its plural form simply because there is no single world literature, but
rather copresent alternatives. In parallel to the neoliberal transnational
global version, we can conceive of world literature as a premodern and preEuropean phenomenon (semantic paleontology), or as a worldwide traveling
juncture shuttling between East and West, not confined to the European
tradition. The critical assessment of contemporary trends investigates “how
premodern forms persist within modernity” (Tihanov, “On the Significance”
424) or unveils the uncanny temporal mechanism whereof contemporary
phenomena have already existed in premodern conditions.21 In Tihanov’s
conceptual grid, the spatial dimension (the heterotopia of exile and heterocultural environment) is therefore important, but the temporal dimension
plays an even more crucial role as the copresence of different historical layers (heterochronia, accumulating time). The uncanny effects of afterlives
of circumvented phenomena constitute different trajectories of discontinuous continuities (including the continuity of literary theory today after the
paradigm shift). Like Bakhtin, Tihanov is fascinated by the “multitude of
previously concealed horizons and voices,” by the diverse semantic deposits
of past forms and their use and abuse in the present situation.
Of course, the main plotline in The Birth and Death of Literary Theory is the vector of language, or the condition of heteroglossia as a
pivotal point for modern literary theory. The act of traversing the chronotopic dimension comes with the ability to switch between languages and
transcend national boundaries, which prevents the naturalization of any
cultural environment. This traversal produces the estranging distance of
self-reflexivity (the heterogeneity of the self as haunted by otherness) that
makes possible the questioning of any discursive formation as a conditioned
construct. Thus we can suggest the four-dimensional epistemological grid,
which includes heterotopia, heterochronia, heteroglossia, and self-reflexivity
as methodological instruments for exploring the future of world literature
and the uncanny return of literary theory.
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Jakobson’s Green Herring: On Self-Reflexivity
“It hangs in the drawing room and
is green; what is it?” The answer: “A
herring.”—“Why in a drawing room?”—
“Well, why couldn’t they hang it there?”
“Why green?”—“It was painted green.”—
“But why?”—“To make it harder to
guess.”
—Jakobson
Jakobson’s “linguistic fundamentalism” is an exemplary case of
the regime of discursive autonomy in which literature is approached from
the vantage point of its poetic function grounded in language. The poetic
function facilitates the conception of literariness neither as public utility nor
as individual entertainment. Jakobson explores literature not in translation,
but always in its original language so that the linguistic organization of
poetry is analyzed through figures of sound and euphonic devices, meter,
rhyme, repetitive alliteration, and assonance. Whether the text should be
studied in translation or in its original language is the point of a pivotal division among the Russian formalists. Shklovsky (having identified the device
of estrangement) and Bakhtin (who theorized the contextual-dialogical pattern) argue that literariness exists regardless of the original language of the
work. Jakobson, unlike Shklovsky and Bakhtin, “believed that literariness is
lodged in the intricate, fine-grained workings of language. To him, only the
language of the original matters, because this intricacy cannot be captured
in translation. It was not by chance that Jakobson spent his entire career
(when it comes to his work as a literary scholar) analysing texts written in
verse, basing these analyses on the language of the original” (Tihanov, Birth
181). In the book’s epilogue, Tihanov explicitly states that the present-day
discourse of world literature is anticipated by Shklovsky and Bakhtin’s perspective. Conversely, Jakobson’s theoretical stance has faded, which might
explain why there is no separate chapter on his work in the book.
And yet, it seems to me that something else is going on. It could
be unraveled as a Derridean premise: the key chapter on Jakobson is absent,
but traces of his legacy have been disseminated throughout the study.22 What
is more, the resurrection of Jakobson (or linguistic fundamentalism) is a
palpable factor in Tihanov’s own approach, relying as it does on the climate
of polyglossia that was the most important condition in the early stage of
literary theory. The intellectual effort to mediate between languages and
cultures without erasing their native environment is a significant aspect of
Tihanov’s work. One readily notices that his account is situated between
Jakobson’s linguistic fundamentalism and Bakhtin’s metalinguistic dialogue
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d i f f e r e n c e s
(apart from English, Tihanov’s articles can be read in several languages,
including Russian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Polish). Tihanov’s sympathy
is more with the earlier “fully bilingual existence” of intellectuals in exile
than with the scholars of the second wave of French theory in the 1960s
and ’70s who discarded the bilingual requisite (Birth 13). One way to tell
the story of the fate of literary theory is by following the trajectory of Jakobson’s “peregrinations from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Prague, New York,
and other cities, mapping his participation in the Moscow Linguistic Circle
and opoyaz, meeting Shklovsky, Troubetzkoy, and Lévi-Strauss, gathering
up and synthesizing all the conceptual components defining the structuralist sense of theory and its reconfiguration of the human sciences through
the twinned enterprises of linguistics and anthropology” (Rodowick 98). In
many ways, Tihanov’s study fills the map of these peregrinations.
As already pointed out, The Birth and Death of Literary Theory is
focused on the clash between formalism and Marxism and on the mediated
forms and fluctuations between them. The antagonism between formalism
and Marxism can be traced back to Jakobson’s early article “On Realism
in Art” (1921), written in Russian, first published in Czech (1921), and forty
years later, finally published in Russian (1962). At the time of its writing,
Jakobson was a daring twenty-five-year-old scholar actively involved with
the Russian avant-garde: with Aleksei Kruchenykh’s experiment with poetic
sound, Velimir Khlebnikov’s invention of the zaum language, and the artistic explorations of futurism and Dada. In the article, Jakobson postulates
manifold dispersive layers of realism and asserts “the extreme relativity
of the concept of ‘realism’ ” (24), differentiating various attributions and
contextualizations of the term depending on the theoretical paradigm. He
thus advances the idea of the plurality of realism and anticipates the 1930s
Lukács-Brecht debate on real realism.23 As Tihanov points out, this early
formalist work can be seen as offering avant la lettre a critique of and an
alternative to the Marxist debate on realism.
Jakobson insists on strict scholarly terminology in order to avoid
the habitual repertoire of positivist historians of literature who shared chatty
and charming anecdotes about “life” under the umbrella of realism (Tihanov emphasizes the insistence on scientific rigor as a major feature of the
formalist legacy). Instead of the uncritical usage of literary terms, Jakobson
demands self-reflexive observation of the multiple uses of the notion of realism. He provides exact definitions of nine forms of realism, endowing them
with precise theoretical frameworks and almost mathematical formulas
by focusing on the figure of the author (A 1; A 2 ), the reader/critic (B1; B2 ), the
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context (C1; C 2 ), the device (D1; D 2 ) and the code (E). In this disposition of
the different types of realism, we can retroactively recognize the six communicative functions of language elaborated by Jakobson in “On Realism in
Art.” For the purposes of my discussion, the crucial moment concerns two
tendencies synchronically operating within the entire model:
1.
2.
The typical mode: Its main operators are naturalization and
faithfulness to already established conventions of reality. This
is the conservative, traditional, canonical trend characterized
by its claim to genuine realism.
The atypical mode: Its main operator is deformation. Its ruling
principles are anomaly and novelty, along with the denial of current conditions and conventions. This mode is representative of
revolutionary trends and avant-garde art.
Jakobson emphatically separates conservative realism, with its denial of
“the self-sufficient aesthetic value of deformation” (24), from higher realism,
with its punch for anomaly and distortion of already established verisimilitude. The former is characterized by its resistance to novelty, while the latter insists on its self-reflexive capacity to recognize and discard traditional
poetic laws. Both modes can be related to the author, and thus we have the
realistic author (A 2 ), who opts for maximum fidelity to truth and accurate
depiction of nature or reality, or, conversely, the modern author, with their
impetus to be realist but only in a higher sense of the word, as sur-realist,
or hyper-realist (A 1 ). This “higher sense” requires the deformation of words
and the violation of the common rules and norms of art.
The model can also be attributed to the reader’s horizon of expectation, from which there emerges the conservative reader (B 2 ), who expects
the familiar deployment of old literary techniques, and the rebellious reader
(B1 ), who recognizes the automatization of devices. The conservative reader
or critic points out the deformation of established artistic codes as a “distortion of reality” while the rebellious reader recognizes the deformation of
the familiar code as a better rendition of reality.
On the level of context, we have the historical trend of nineteenthcentury Realism and the subsequent naturalization of this understanding of
realism by an accompanying production of the illusion of timelessness, to
use Tihanov’s account. As a result, there is progressive, or even avant-garde
atypical realism (C1 ), and classic realism (C 2 ). The avant-garde tendency
deforms reality, while the classic tendency follows the logic of identification
and authenticity.
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d i f f e r e n c e s
Not to miss the forest for the trees, the core point of Jacobson’s
brief and dense essay has to do with the device. The differences between
Shklovsky and Jakobson regarding the status of the device marks the distinction between the theory of estrangement and the poetic function—and the
different politics behind them (Tihanov, Birth 39).24 The mode of deformation
corresponds to the atypical abnormal device, the mode of naturalization to
the typical normal device. Normality or deviation is taken into account with
regard to the author, the reader, and/or the context and can match present
aesthetic conventions or be in discord and conflict with them. Discussing
the different ways of naming the sexual act, Jakobson observes that the process of deformation is always present: there is no zero level of deformation
in language. To use the “real names” of copulation is to deform established
euphemisms or to skip already accepted metaphors. Thus, in art per se it
is not possible to represent an object without deforming it—the shape, the
color, the distance, the zoom in and zoom out techniques. Deformation is
inevitable in art, but it can be either naive and unaware of its procedures or
self-reflexive, manifesting its own principle of refracting reality.
The dogmatic East European Stalinist “theory of reflection,”
which will take the upper hand and be enforced as the norm in the Soviet
Union in the 1930s, definitely represents the naive concept of realism, with
its requirements for authenticity and its instructions for maximum verisimilitude by representing typical heroes and typical circumstances. Lukács,
as one of the most prominent Marxist advocates of genuine or real realism,
contends that there is an authentic homogeneous immediate contiguity
between art and reality. In his book on Lukács and Bakhtin, Tihanov studies
this debate in detail, noting, “For Lukács, language is completely neutral
to the process of reflection” (Master 59). On the other side of the Marxist
debate on realism stand Valentin Voloshinov and Mikhail Lifshitz with
their concept of mediated realism, a realism refracted by language.25 They
insist on a nonauthentic heterogeneous logic involved in the verbal code of
production and in the techniques of art. This conceptual discord provided
the theoretical framework for battles in which aesthetic considerations were
directly intertwined with ideology and politics. Anticipating the debate,
Jakobson denies the possibility of one real realism. Scholars who subscribe
to the idea of a single genuine realism, he claims, make a reductive generalization, as in the sentence: man, or even better, woman, is typically
twenty years old. Apart from demonstrating the heterogeneous uses of the
concept, he defines realism on a metalevel as “the requirement of consistent
motivation and realization of poetic devices” (27), stressing techniques in art
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and their transformative revolutionary forces. The debates on realism can
consequently be structured around the consideration of language: whether
its role is recognized (Jakobson, Voloshinov) or ignored (Lukács).
If we return to the Armenian riddle in the epigraph, above, the
herring is green so as to make us focus on language itself.26 The greenness
of the herring is atypical, thus it makes visible the code of the work of art.
We are not blindly succumbing to the transparency of poetic devices (as in
Barthes’s reality effect). The self-reflexive gesture of art opens it toward its
own techniques and makes the code visible; the deformation becomes more
palpable. It uncovers the critical potential of art. The self-reflexive function
in literature always puts an emphasis on language and discredits naturalization. Jakobson’s article “On Realism in Art” denaturalizes realism, revealing
that the very concept of realism is multiple because it implements artistic,
ideological, and political premises pertaining to different historical contexts.
In a similar manner, Tihanov’s radical historicity discloses the
naturalization that produces the effect of timelessness in historical phenomena. “The vector of self-reflexivity [ . . . ] helps us to capture a different set of
phenomena: here, literature still engages earlier texts, but it does so in order
to ponder the very idea of world literature, not with triumphalist confidence
in its own powers of regeneration, but in the low key of skeptical reflection”
(“Location” 475). The birth and death of literary theory set limits, allowing
precisely this type of low-key skeptical reflection that questions the past in
order to face the future.
To conclude, Jakobson’s theory and Auerbach’s philology are not
opposed to one another. On the contrary, they share common ground in the
historical relativity of theoretical concepts, the analysis of style, and the
slow reading of literature not in translation but in the original language.
The return to philology does not contradict, but rather implies, the return
to theory.
kamelia spassova is an assistant professor in the Literary Theory Department at the University of Sofia. Her book on the poetics of the example, Event and Example in Plato and
Aristotle (Literaturen vestnik, 2012), deals with the tension between literary examples and
theoretical discourses. She is currently working on transformations of the concept of mimesis
in the twentieth century.
Notes
1
For a more detailed account of
Tihanov’s concept of regime of
relevance, see Nikolchina; and
Paskaleva. Tihanov’s key concept
is introduced as follows: “The
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meaning I invest in the term
“regime of relevance” harks back
to Foucault, but here it has a more
specific semantic compass: it
refers to a historically available
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d i f f e r e n c e s
constellation of social and cultural
parameters that shape the predominant understanding and use
of literature for the duration of that
particular constellation” (Birth
1–2).
2
Tihanov does not oppose literary
theory to world literature as conflicted epistemes; in fact, he insists
in the book’s epilogue that the contemporary discourse of world literature is an unreflected-on continuation of the fundamental questions
of classical literary theory, mainly
the question of language. In this
essay, I argue for the unreflective
background of so-called world
literature and the self-reflective
mode of literary theory.
3
I deal in greater detail with the
problem of philosophical and theoretical exemplification in Sabitie i
primer u Platon i Aristotel (Event
and Example in Plato and Aristotle). See also Bové.
4
Lotman conceives the structure of
the text as heterogeneous because
it is at least dually coded. Semiosis
is the process of inner hybridization, which has an automodeling
capacity to bring novelty. For a
discussion of the limits of self- or
metadescription that considers the
center-periphery relation in Lotman, see Kliger.
5
Julia Kristeva wrote a short essay
on the legacy of Juri Lotman in
1994 that was published in pmla
(“On Yury Lotman”). A bright and
innovative founder of the TartuMoscow Semiotic School, Lotman
had died just a few months earlier,
in October 1993. Kristeva points
out her theoretical connection to
Lotman, comparing her notion
of intertextuality to his idea of a
secondary modeling system.
6
The fact that Tihanov refers to
Benjamin and his idea of history in
the end of the prologue is already
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telling (Birth 7). For Tihanov, it is
crucial to deconstruct the illusion
of timelessness in any discursive
formation. For further reading
on the structural and conceptual
characteristics of afterness and
afterlife (Nachleben) in Aby Warburg and Benjamin, see Richter
2–7).
7
Turner’s short introductory definition of philology emphasizes language: “Philology referred to all
studies of language, of specific
languages, and (to be sure) of
texts. [ . . . ] The word philology in
the nineteenth century covered
three distinct modes of research:
1) textual philology (including
classical and biblical studies, ‘oriental’ literatures such as those in
Sanskrit and Arabic, and medieval
and modern European writings);
2) theories of the origin and nature
of language; and 3) comparative
study of the structures and historical evolution of languages and of
language families” (Turner x).
8
For further conceptualization of
incommensurability and untranslatability in the notion of comparative literature, see Derrida.
9
For the notion of European philology as a humanistic tool, see
Angelov.
10
The letters between Auerbach
and Benjamin offer a remarkable
critical reflection of the human
sciences and their potential to
become a bridge between modern
Turkey and the classic European
heritage. Kemal Atatürk’s reforms
were seen as antitraditional
nationalism, “the establishment
of a fantastic relation to a primal
Turkish identity, technological
modernization in the European
sense, in order to triumph against
a hated and yet admired Europe
with its own weapon” (Barck
82). The paradox is that between
the wars, Western philology and
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The Return to/of Theory
humanism were sheltered in
pro-European Turkey. For further reading on the situation of
the German- Jewish intellectual
between East and West, see Konuk.
11
Said’s role is that of a mediator
between Auerbach’s legacy and the
post-postcolonial studies of literature. The transition between them
is crucial.
12
Of course, different voices with
their own theoretical backgrounds
can be discerned in the contemporary discourse of world literature.
One of the most vital attempts is
Apter’s project focused on language zones. She reflects on the
politics of untranslatability in the
frame of Benjamin’s translation
theory by placing it between Auerbach’s philology and the historical materialism of the Frankfurt
School. See Apter 7–9.
13
Vilashini Cooppan marks two perspectives on the new cosmopolitan
world literature: either the utopia
of economic and cultural exchange
or the dystopia of homogenization (“World” 15). While definitely
siding with the first option, Vilashini looks for a balancing point
between global omnipresence
and local exoticism precisely with
Theory (specifically, poststructuralism) as a tool. I find her return
to the Freudian concept of the
uncanny (das Unheimlich) and its
Romantic genealogy productive.
The uncanny effect, as Cooppan
points out, makes differences in
the very act of repetition, but more
importantly it also temporalizes
those differences. “The literary
zone of ‘what is like-but-unlike’
marks out a strikingly similar
space to the uncanny’s disjunctive
merging of the familiar and the
strange, the present and the past,
the repressed and the returned”
(“Ghosts” 21). Such a mode of reading demands double vision, the
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recognition of similarities, and the
awareness of eventual misrecognition (negative anagnorisis) of
what only seems to be similar, but
is not, in geopolitical and historical terms. Notably, the practice of
uncanny reading implies estrangement of the familiar, suggesting
the pertinence of Shklovsky’s
theory to the uncanny.
14
In the short essay “The Return to
Philology,” Paul de Man reflects
on practices of teaching literature. He argues that the time has
come to go beyond the clash of
philology and theory, contending
that the two discourses should
be opponents no more, but partners instead—as were poetics and
rhetoric in the past: “[T]he turn
to theory occurred as a return to
philology, to an examination of
the structure of language prior
to the meaning it produces” (26).
He insists that the partnership of
theory and philology goes beyond
the humanistic and historical disciplines, that is, the entanglement
between philology and hermeneutics. The slogan the return to philology was also proclaimed in 1987
at the What Is Philology? conference organized by Jan Ziolkowski
at Harvard University. De Man
thus seems to have anticipated the
new wave of returning to (digital)
philology (Ziolkowski).
15
Tihanov does not, however, delve
further into how the founders of
modernity, Nietzsche, Freud, and
Marx, were modified by Lacan and
Althusser and then by Foucault,
Kristeva, Todorov, and French
theory after 1968. This intriguing scenario, he alludes, will be
developed in another project. For
the Second Golden Age of Theory
after May ’68, with its complex
trajectory between Western
Europe and America, see Tihanov,
“Romanticism’s.”
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d i f f e r e n c e s
16
These tools of literariness are
compared with the dreamwork
and the verbal lapsus in Freud’s
method because they mark
the semiotic and poetic layers
of language (to use Kristeva’s
terminology).
17
De Man emphasizes metalanguage
as a major premise for the occurrence of literary theory (8).
18
The phrase was mentioned by
Watkins at the What Is Philology?
conference and repeated there by
Jonathan Culler, Barbara Johnson,
and Jan Ziolkowski.
19
Pollock is a coeditor, along with
Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming
Kevin Chang, of the fine volume
World Philology, which merges the
discourses of world literature and
the new philology.
20
For more on Jakobson’s lecture
in Bulgaria, see Nikolchina, “Of
Bugs.”
21
The idea of persistent forms in
the tradition of historical poetics
(through the prism of Alexander
Veselovsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and
Olga Freidenberg) is a promising
project driven by Ilya Kliger and
Boris Maslov.
22
The Derridean tendency in Tihanov’s book is thoroughly developed
by Tenev.
23
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