Literary chronicle: on the problem of the institutional description of the activity of a literary organization

The article explores the boundaries of the term “literary chronicle”. The scientific community is beginning to take a more detailed interest in such a concept as a literary institution. Throughout the twentieth century, literary studies studied and described only individual periods in the history of literature. This development of individual periods of the century helped to create the necessary theoretical tools for analytical work on the study of the socio-cultural process in society. For many years, the very attempt to understand the literary process as a phenomenon encountered terminological blurring. The accumulated knowledge of historical literary studies allows us to raise as a problem of scientific research a chronicle description of the life of a literary organization, which is understood as a structural association of creative people (on the example of individual facts of the existence of All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers). It is the socio-institutional description of the life of the literary community of Russia in the 1920s that allows us to feel the communicative space of the country in which cultural processes take place. Another important aspect in the study of the chronicle of a literary institution is its existence in everyday life, that is, its existence in everyday life. With the frequency of meetings of members of the structural association. In this case, the scattered facts of everyday life become a historical stream of events.

History as Antidote to Wounded National Pride: Politics of History in Kemal Tahir’s Devlet Ana

This article analyses Devlet Ana, Kemal Tahir’s novel on the rise of the Ottomans, within the scope of the politics of history. Through an analysis of Tahir’s novel, the article reveals the political and ideological forces that brought about a reactionary, monolithic, and totalising understanding of history and historiography in the Turkish literary institution. The article argues that despite Tahir’s allegedly Marxist framing, his understanding of history—driven by an inferiority complex and Westophobia—hardly goes beyond an ethical binarism in which absolute good or evil racial and civilisational nature determines everything.

A Monolingual World Literature

This chapter is devoted to the writer Sholem Asch, arguably the Yiddish writer most aligned with the normative demands of world literature—as market, network, and idealized transnational republic. Asch’s fame in the interwar period, in Europe and then in the US, in Yiddish and in translation, relied on his belief in the possibility for reconciliation between Jews and Christians, especially through the creation of a unified redemptive literary institution. Focusing on his novels Three Cities and Salvation, the chapter posits that Asch is a model for a monolingual world literature, which may be written in multiple languages but whose texts seek to employ a mutually translatable universal vocabulary. This chapter counters this faith in translation by reading vernacular incongruity back into Asch’s texts, revealing a disjunction between Asch’s institutional longings and the realities of his vernacular commitments.

“La tona” e “Hículi Hualula” como dos visiones antitéticas sobre lo indígena en El diosero, de Francisco Rojas González

RESUMEN En este trabajo se analizan dos cuentos del importante pero poco estudiado libro El diosero (1952), de Francisco Rojas González, como dos posturas antitéticas sobre el indígena. “La tona” e “Hículi Hualula” se inscriben en un contexto donde el debate sobre la mexicanidad se encontraba en boga tanto por la institución literaria como por la antropológica. Antropólogo de profesión, Rojas González aparece como una figura que a través de una de sus narraciones problematizará la disciplina a la que pertenece. La postura del autor sobre el conocimiento del indígena será un antecedente para la literatura indigenista mexicana posterior y para el pensamiento latinoamericano que pondrá en duda la superioridad del conocimiento de occidente.Palabras clave: Rojas González, antropología, indigenismo, Tona, Hículi Hualula ABSTRACT In this paper, we analyze two tales from the important but little studied book El diosero (1952), by Francisco Rojas González, as two antithetical positions on the indigenous. "La tona" and "Hícula Hualula" are part of a context where the debate about Mexicanness was in vogue in the literary institution as well as in the anthropological one. Anthropologist by profession, Rojas González appears as a figure who, through one of his narrations, would problematize the discipline to which he belongs. The author's position on indigenous knowledge would set a precedent for later Mexican indigenist literature and for the Latin American thought that would put in doubt the superiority of West's knowledgeKeywords: Rojas González, anthropology, indigenismo, Tona, Hícula Hualula

Edith Sitwell’s Critical Self-Doubling

Contrary to a long history of scholarship that considers Sitwell’s personality a major detriment to her historical and contemporary reception, this chapter understands Sitwell’s self-marketing strategy as genius critical self-doubling. To this end, Sitwell’s most important genre is criticism, in which she displays a penchant for often unattributed self-reference and self-explication. Sitwell doubles herself in her criticism, forging an arbitrary division between Sitwell the empirical critic and Sitwell the poet-philosopher; the empirical critic functions as a stand-in for the critico-literary institution, providing an “external” imprimatur for the poet-philosopher. Examining Noël Coward’s creation of Sitwell’s parodic poet-doppelgänger, Hernia Whittlebot, thus allows an understanding of Sitwell’s own self-doubling as integral to her self-marketing genius—Whittlebot’s relationship to Sitwell reenacts Sitwell’s approach to her own work. More broadly, these relations are a microcosm for the institution of modernist literary criticism that developed conterminously with the maturation and solidification of Sitwell’s strategies of authorship.