WORLD LITERATURE AND CANON

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.

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.

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.

The paper compares the debut novel of author Ernest Cline and its film adaptation by director Steven Spielberg in terms of the way they construct and utilize an alternative canon, closely related to the video game culture. Of main interest to this study is the critical reception of both works and its possible implications.

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.

Returning to “The Purloined Letter” introduces the question of interpretation on two intertwined levels – the internal (the fictional characters’ comments) and the external (the critics’ comments). The paper has the task of tracing interpretive strategies through characters’ voices, i.e. through the conflict of internal interpretations. Monsieur G’s method insists on the typical and on hermeneutic depth. The detective Dupin uses the contrasting approach; he conceptualizes the logic of the incommensurable and mimicry. The anonymous narrator's voice is not impartial, he confides in Dupin and so there are blind spots in the narrative itself. The following paper unfolds two detective micro-plots by following the tracks of the epigraphist and the author of the purloined letter. I examine the poetics of narrative as isomorphic to the manners in which we interrogate the interpretations of the characters within it. The conclusion is not surprising – reading is a real detective story.

The paper examines the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar as an example of world literature, going through three steps. The first step is to question why Marguerite Yourcenar is one of the authors included in David Damrosch’s “Around the World in 80 Books”. The second step is looking at the notion of world literature through the concepts of Harold Bloom’s “The West- ern Canon”, Ognyan Kovachev’s “Literature and Identity Transformations of Otherness”, and Galin Tihanov’s “Beyond Circulation”. The third step reads Yourcenar’s method as being in line with the idea of literary zones and zonality.