Pour une théorie périphérique et/ou amoureuse : lectures d’Agamben, Derrida, Rancière

 

The 2020 winter issue of Interlitteraria contains the second instalment of papers issued from the conference “Current State of Literary Theory, Research

and Criticism in (Non-“Centric”) National Cultures” held by the Estonian Association of Comparative Literature in 2019 in Tartu.

The opening essay by H. L. Hix outlines a problematic developed by the following case studies about literatures from different parts of the world, exploring the role of literary theory and poetic practices in the shaping and reshaping of national literary fields. Papers about literature and literary studies in Slovakia (Ladislav Franek, Zvonko Taneski), Russia (Natalia Tuliakova

& Natalia Nikitina), Estonia (Susanna Soosaar), Latvia (Artis Ostups) and Lithuania (Audinga Peluritytė), A lbania (Marisa Kërbizi & Edlira Macaj), Argentina (Lucía Caminada Rossetti), Hong Kong (Karen Lee), India and Africa (Shivani Ekkanath) address a variety of issues in cultures and regions outside the long-time major centres of inf luence in the Western world. The

concluding papers by Francesca Manzari and Anne-Marie Le Baillif reflect upon non-centricity and changes within such central cultures themselves.

The Miscellanea section offers various looks into similarly diverse literatures and regions through analyses of motif history (Ruihui Han) and individual authors’ works (Adriano Cerri, Zhang Junping & Zhang Bin, Tomás Espino Barrera, Dinah Schöneich and Michael Navratil).

Both sections, conference-based and freely formed from independent contributions, rather unanimously demonstrate that there is no single voice of comparative literary scholarship, but a polyphonic search for pertinent research perspectives and then relevant findings therein. Even with a strongly shared perspective, as is the case for the last three papers that tackle the issue of multilingualism, comparative studies are rarely comparable, shaping themselves according to the objects they bring into dialogue, but they are highly

complementary.

This issue of Interlitteraria has the privilege of representing multi lingualism not only as a research topic, but through a strong presence of three of the journal’s working languages and, as usual, a number of discreet looks into a variety of linguistic realities via the works studied and quoted in the papers.

Thereby the journal continues to serve as a tangible reminder of the need for multilingual reading, which is indispensable for following the “living streams of World Literature”, as Lauri Pilter has paraphrased the title of Gerald Gillespie’s recent monograph that he reviews in the conclusion of this volume.

Katre Talviste