Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe?

Abstract

The emergence of literary theory in Eastern and Central Europe was conditional upon a process of disintegration and modification of monolithic philosophical approaches on the eve of, and immediately after, World War I. This is one of the two major ways, in which modern literary theory was born, the strongest cases being the transformation of Marxism into a theory relevant to interpreting literature in the 1920s and the 1930s, most seminally in the work of the Hungarian-Jewish thinker György (Georg) Lukács (1885–1971), and the modifications of Husserlian phenomenology in the work of the Polish theoretician Roman Ingarden (1893–1970), who rendered phenomenology pertinent to the study of the “literary work of art”. The second venue we have to explore when discussing the birth of modern literary theory in Eastern and Central Europe is that exemplified by the collective efforts of the Russian Formalists and the Prague Linguistic Circle. The emergence of literary theory in Russia and Czechoslovakia in the 1920s-1930s followed a different path. Unlike Lukács’s or Ingarden’s work it did not originate in the modification of an overarching philosophical paradigm. Rather, it reflected the growing discontent with scholarly positivism, as well as – most crucially – the need to confront, make sense of, and give support, to fresh and radical modes of creative writing, which were making themselves felt in the literature of the Futurists in Russia and of the Czech, largely surrealist, avant-garde. Thus the engine of change behind literary studies was located, on the one hand, in the immanent evolution of philosophy and the dissatisfaction with traditional methodologies of literary scholarship, which by then were wearing thin beyond repair, but also, on the other hand, in the challenges stemming from the new artistic practices of the avant-garde and from the legacy of Romanticism, their most important precursor. Whatever the differences between these two scenarios, it is essential to stress the fact that in both cases the birth of modern literary theory in Easterm and Central Europe would not have been possible without a historically specific environment of heteroglossia, enhanced intercultural exchange, and border-crossing, exile being the most dramatic example thereof.