WORLD LITERATURE AND CANON

07/05/2023

Stilian Yotov

Adorno and the Failures of Realism

  • ABSTRACT

    The article offers a reconstruction of the main moments of the relationship between Th. W. Adorno and G. Lukacs in the period after the Second World War. The first part focuses on the challenge provoked by Lukacs’s book “The Young Hegel” and on the interpretation of it by Adorno in the spirit of idealism and as a project comparable to Heidegger’s. For Adorno, these are forms of totalizing thinking through which the subject suppresses and muffles the originality of objects. The second part focuses on the effect of Lukacs’s book “The Destruction of Reason” and the accusation of German Classical Philosophy in irrationalism. For Adorno, there is room for irrationalism in true dialectics. But far more frightening to him are the variants of one-sided rationality, as well as its incarnations in the power structures that crush all dissent. This is where the specific problem that led to the enmity between Adorno and Lukacs comes to light – the so-called “partisanship” of art or the ideology – art relationship. The third and fourth parts deal with the relationship between avant-garde art and realism, in which Lukacs sees a subjective-antisocial escape from reality, and Adorno – an expression of heterogeneity of the socially-objective world itself.


07/05/2023

Lyudmil Dimitrov

Rethinking Pushkin, or the Balkan Aftertaste of Russian Romanticism

  • ABSTRACT

    There was a fierce controversy in Russian literary studies as to whether it is justified to speak of a romantic discourse in Pushkin’s poetry in the early 1920s (1819–1824) and what caused it, provided that there was no major social cataclysm to unleash the relevant conceptual  direction  in  literature.  It  missed  something  particularly  important: the Greek uprising of 1821, echoed among all Balkan nations, and the increased  fascination  with  Byron’s  rebellious  poems  (a  kind  of  “import” of Byronism) demonstrated by the first poet of Russia. How the ideas of “Megali Idea” and “Eteria” reflect on the strengthening of the Greek (rebellious) theme and the appearance of the Bulgarian hero in Pushkin’s work, and in a sense provoke the Decembrist revolt in late 1825, will be discussed with examples from his lyric poetry and prose, outlining an overall paradigm in the poet’s existential turn and his attitude to freedom.


07/05/2023

Kalin Mikhaylov

The Use of Religious Motifs and Themes in the Short Essays of Georgi Markov and Petar Uvaliev

  • ABSTRACT

    This paper compares the short essays of two of the most prominent Bulgarian political exiles in the United Kingdom in the second part of the 20th century – Petar Uvaliev (1915–1998) and Georgi Markov (1929–1978).  Both  authors  wrote  their  essays  to  be  aired  on  the  radio – Markov wrote them for the Radio Free Europe, Deutsche Welle and BBC, whereas Uvaliev’s texts appeared in the weekly BBC radio program Five minutes with Petar Uvaliev. Even though the life and writing trajectories of these authors differ significantly, as well as their perspectives on the totalitarian regime in People’s Republic of Bulgaria, their writings find common ground in the exploration of religious ideas and stylistic devices. This article seeks to identify the similarities and the differences in the ways Markov and Uvaliev treat religious themes and motifs in their essays. The paper also highlights the great art of essay writing and their intimate and strong connection to the Bulgarian cultural tradition.


07/05/2023

Nikolay Genov

Ready Player One on Screen: Cline and Spielberg’s Alternative Canon


WORLD LITERATURE AND CANON

07/05/2023

Galin Tihanov

Of Journeys and Masks. Giorgio De Chirico, Saryan and World Literature under Quarantine

  • ABSTRACT

    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.


07/05/2023

Kamelia Spassova

E. A. Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”: Interpretation as a Detective Story


07/05/2023

Francheska Zemyarska

Literary Zones: M. Yourcenar and the Concept of World Literature