In the following text, I want to look at the nexus of word and visuality that is so central to Ognyan Kovachev’s work (and to how important themes and stock images of world literature travel in time), and to do so with our recent pandemic crisis in mind. I take my cue from the importance, until recently also ubiquity, of the mask in order to examine the co-existence of word and image from a different perspective, moving also in a different geographical direction, from Europe to the Caucasus, where the consolidation of Armenian literature as a national literature takes place in the first two decades of the last century.
Of Journeys and Masks. Giorgio De Chirico, Saryan and World Literature under Quarantine
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Galin Tihanov
Queen Mary University of London,ORCID: 0000-0002-0007-6908Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of five books, most recently The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2019) which won the 2020 AATSEEL Prize for “Best Book in Literary Studies”. His co-edited volume A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond (2011) won the 2012 Efim Etkind Prize. His work in intellectual history and on cosmopolitanism and world literature has been widely translated. His last book in Bulgarian is World Literature. Cosmopolitanism. Exile (2022). Tihanov has been elected to the British Academy and to Academia Europaea.
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Abstract:ABSTRACTIn the following text, I want to look at the nexus of word and visuality that is so central to Ognyan Kovachev’s work (and to how important themes and stock images of world literature travel in time), and to do so with our recent pandemic crisis in mind. I take my cue from the importance, until recently also ubiquity, of the mask in order to examine the co-existence of word and image from a different perspective, moving also in a different geographical direction, from Europe to the Caucasus, where the consolidation of Armenian literature as a national literature takes place in the first two decades of the last century.
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