The Birth and Death of Literary Theory : Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond

Winner of the 2020 AATSEEL Best Book in Literary Studies, sponsored by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. This book has been enriched not only by the works of the thinkers whose paths it follows, but also by the contributions — tangible and intangible — of many scholars, colleagues, students, and friends who have been part of my work on it. The book originates in a conference paper which subsequently became an article in the journal Common Knowledge , attracting many responses. Imme ­ diately after the conference, Caryl Emerson, Bill Todd, Katerina Clark, Irina Paperno, and Laura Engelstein began encouraging me to write an entire book on the birth and death of literary theory; for this encouragement — then and over the years — I remain deeply grateful to them all. I was skeptical at the time, because I believed that the article format is better suited to my argument and concise style of presentation. Time has proved them right: the need to demonstrate the radical historicity of literary theory and its embeddedness in a particular regime of relevance that valorizes literature in ways so different from those before and after that, just as the compelling question about the legacies of literary theory, could not be addressed within the confines of that original text. As my research in this field evolved, I felt increasingly empow ­ ered to expand and nuance my argument by drawing wider comparative par ­ allels. Continuing to think as an intellectual historian, I have been at pains to discern the foundational paradoxes of literary theory, its time-limited mani ­ festations concealed behind an illusion of timelessness. Until the 1940s, when awareness of Russian Formalism began to spread, literary theory remained almost exclusively a Russian and Eastern European invention. 'The Birth and Death of Literary Theory' tells the story of literary theory by focusing on its formative interwar decades in Russia. Nowhere else did literary theory emerge and peak so early, even as it shared space with other modes of reflection on literature. A comprehensive account of every important Russian trend between the world wars, the book traces their wider impact in the West during the 20th and 21st centuries. Ranging from Formalism and Bakhtin to the legacy of classic literary theory in our post-deconstruction, world literature era, Galin Tihanov provides answers to two fundamental questions: What does it mean to think about literature theoretically, and what happens to literary theory when this option is no longer available? Asserting radical historicity, he offers a time-limited way of reflecting upon literature-not in order to write theory's obituary but to examine its continuous presence across successive regimes of relevance. Engaging and insightful, this is a book for anyone interested in theory's origins and in what has happened since its demise A comprehensive account of all major trends in Russian interwar literary theory and its wider impact in our post-deconstruction and world literature era, this book attempts to answer two fundamental questions: What does it mean to think about literature theoretically, and what happens to literary theory when it is no longer available as an option?