The International of Peripheries. Avant-Garde Networks of East- Central Europe [Internaționala periferiilor. Rețeaua avangardelor din Europa Centrală și de Est]

• Published in: Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory Vol. 6; no. 1; pp. 172 - 180
• Main Author: Tăranu, Ana
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Cluj-Napoca Faculty of Letters, UBB 01.07.2020
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Avant-garde; Constructivism; Culture; Ideology; Intersectionality; Literary criticism; Literary devices; Literary influences; Literary translation; Literature; Logic; Narrative techniques; Quantitative analysis; Sociology; Transnationalism; World literature; Eastern Europe; Central Europe; Europe
• ISSN: 2457-8827

[...]it constantly addresses previous scholarship in an attempt to foreground and destabilize the theoretical clichés with which it operates, and due to which it has, albeit unjustifiably, located certain literary phenomena under the hegemonic centre-periphery binomial. Given that the historical avant-gardes of Eastern and Central European countries have been subjected to institutionally enforced peripherality, misrepresented strictly as a target-culture metabolization of source-culture concepts, to rethink them from within/as a transnational system is to subversively perform the restoration of their relevance as "the first tentatives of cultural export (in the sense of a trans-frontier accumulation of symbolic capital) coming from the direction of peripheral national literatures" (12) and to highlight their decisive involvement in the process of what has been called, over the past two decades, the worlding of literature. Explained under the logic of this biological concept, the local formulations and cultural production of the Eastern and Central European avant-gardes take the shape of a coevolutive network (comprised of the relations between adaptive and evolutionary mutations). [...]any comparative employment of Central and Eastern European national literatures ultimately entails their transnationalization and re-coagulation as an "international of peripheries." [...]it becomes obvious that the Eastern and Central European avant-gardes are unavoidably destitute of their specificity when placed under the reductive East/West or centre/periphery dichotomies, hence requiring the engagement of transnational analysis.