If, as Galin Tihanov has pointed out, literary theory as a discipline was “born” in the north-central regions of Eastern Europe in the 1920s and dominated literary studies until its “death” in the last decades of the twentieth century, what happened during this period in the “other” Eastern Europe (the Southeastern one), what are the causes of the divergencies that occurred, and — more importantly — to what extent can we recover the long Southeast European legacy of discourses of literary and cultural criticism (going back to their inception in the 1860s) from the perspective of current theoretical thinking? In STRASYN, a team of 16 researchers (project director, 9 experienced researchers, 6 postdocs and 4 PhD students) aims to answer these questions by coupling world-system analysis — in particular the concept of subperiphery, theorized by the project members — with the theory of “regimes of relevance,” and then using both to explore literary and cultural criticism in Romania, Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia (particularly Serbia and Slovenia) between 1866 and 1989. Apart from the pioneering quality of such an approach, which proposes a comparative examination of three neighboring literary cultures that have often ignored each other, a remarkably original aspect of our project is that we will test the validity of the literary and cultural theories produced in the region during the period mentioned not only by studying them, but also by reflecting on them and mobilizing some of them as possible explanatory tools, thus seeking to test their current relevance by confronting them with the set of theoretical and critical discourses on literature that dominate literary studies today.
Project title: Theorizing (Sub)peripheries: Strategies of Synchronization in Southeast European Literary and Cultural Criticism
Project code: PNRR-III-C9-2023–I8-CF141/31.07.2023
Contract no. 760247/28.12.2023
Funder: Ministry of Research, Innovation, and Digitalization, via the National Plan of Recovery and Resilience (Component 9, Initiative 8)
Duration: January 1, 2024 – June 30, 2026
Budget: €1,206,604.19
Principal Investigator: Professor Galin Tihanov