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Offers an alternate framing of the literary and political afterlives of revolution between 1928-1968 in Eastern and Western Europe. Aiming to correct the disparity between the abundance of scholarly accounts of 1968 and the simultaneous forgetting of developments in the interwar period that peaked around 1928, this book combines a focus on the transfer of ideas between these two historical turning points with a comparative reading of political literatures in the European East and West. It deepens scholarly awareness of the transnational spaces of interwar literature and explores their afterlives in the post-World War II period. The book troubles and corrects Western European theories of 1968 by tracing the post-war afterlives of shared interwar experiences that point towards a socialist third way, or Georg Lukacs'' tertium datur , and thus out of the conventionally understood East-West binary. It testifies to the existence of a literature that throughout the last century self-consciously oscillated between the exigencies of organized politics and the aesthetic task of helping to shape the humanity of tomorrow. Examining case studies of works by Bertolt Brecht, Ivan Olbracht and August Cesarec among others, Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur excavates a series of problems, optics and styles characteristic of the forgotten episodes of 20th-century literary history. It shows that the proverbial Iron Curtain was not impenetrable, and that the walls and borders erected in the post-war period could not completely suppress the reverberations and revival of projects that flourished in the political-literary metropolises of the interwar period.
List of contents
List of figures
List of abbreviations
Preface
1. Introduction
Part I. The r/evolutionary stalemate 2. What's in a name?
Political literature and the
politics of literature3. Tropes of conflict and disagreement: Interwar metaphors, post-war metonymies
Part II. Nodal point '1928'4. The interwar r/evolutionary controversy
5. 'To marry art to the people': Viennese hybridity
6. Revolutionary pulp fiction: Ernst Fischer's
Lenin (1928) and
Der große Verrat (The Great Treason, 1950)
7. 'Literature, too, is a war zone': Berlin's literary communism
8. The negotiation play: Bertolt Brecht's
Die Maßnahme (
The Measures Taken, 1930/1931)
9. Freedom of art but partisanship of artists: Interwar Prague
10. Male capital and its female peripheries: Ivan Olbracht's
O Anne, rusé prolétarce (About Anna, the Red Proletarian, 1925-1926/1928)
11. The 'social literature swindlers' of Zagreb and Belgrade
12. A tableau of exiles: August Cesarec's
Bjegunci (The Fugitives, 1933)
Part III. Nodal point '1968'13. Cultural revolutions in the West, East, and in-between:
Tertium datur?14. Individualistic anarchism as the vanishing point of the 1968 cultural revolution
15. The dialectics of
and yet: Peter Weiss's
Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (
The Aesthetics of Resistance, 1971-1981)
16. Socialism with a human face but without socialist literature? Political and literary dissent around the Prague Spring
17. Josef Skvorecký's precursory cynicism:
Konec nylonového veku (
The End of the Nylon Age, 1967) and
Mirákl (
The Miracle Game, 1972)
18. 'Traditions and Perspectives' of Yugoslav 1968
19. 'The tragic Tartuffe-like existence of the revolutionary': Ervin Sinko's
Optimisták (The Optimists, 1954) and
Roman jednog romana: Moskovski dnevnik (
The Novel of a Novel: Abridged Diary Entries from Moscow,
1935-1937, 1955)
20. A r/evolutionary synthesis: Georg Lukács's
Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen (
The Specificity of the Aesthetic, 1963)
ReferencesIndex
About the author
Ivana Perica is a research fellow at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), Berlin, Germany, and author of Die privat-öffentliche Achse des Politischen: Das Unvernehmen zwischen Hannah Arendt und Jacques Rancière (2016).
