From (Modernity) to (Postmodernity). Literary-Scholarly Themes, Languages, Methods, Methodologies, and Turns 1500-SDN-TMTB-ONDP

In a conversation with Derek Attridge conducted in April 1989, Jacques Derrida used the formulation that literature – or rather, "this strange institution called literature" – "allows everyone to say everything, in any way whatsoever." The title of the interview alludes to this phrase. In it, Derrida and Attridge brought out two issues: the institutional status of "literature" – a space of institutionalised fiction and a fictive institution (historically variable, labile, defined ever anew) – and its "strangeness." This "strangeness" would consist in the fact that literature is the only institution that guarantees freedom (a potential rupture with prohibitions, a breaking-out, a liberation, a suspension of the rules while remaining conscious of their existence) – that value most highly prized in modernity.
Does literary studies share this status with its (once sole) "object," literature? It would seem that even if not everything can be said within it, then – as the history of literary research teaches – one may at least say it in any way whatever. The styles of scholarly writing have undergone intense transformations since the mid-nineteenth century. The positivist, rigorous demand for "objectivity" (the transparency of the argument; the neutrality and non-engagement of the researching subject, strictly separated from the object under study; and autonomy with respect to the socio-political milieu) – which held, in principle, until the mid-twentieth century and accorded with the later conception of science Max Weber set out in 1917 – lost its monopoly from roughly the 1960s onward. Its definitive end was marked by such contemporary and much-in-vogue proposals as the "public intellectual" and the "public humanities" (Judith Butler), as well as the emotional history of knowledge (Françoise Waquet).
An end, though? Were these demands ever, anywhere in modernity, actually honored in research practice – rather than in declarations, manifestos, and propaedeutic textbooks, and today in the institutions that administer scholarship and its own institutions (the universities)? Looking at modernity retroactively, from the perspective of postmodernity, and attending to theoretical practices, one sees clearly that the ideal of the impartial researcher – observing the object from a distance, non-evaluating, free of "pre(-)judgments" – must decidedly be recognised as an illusion. The more important question, however, is this: why did this delusion (the Derridean "specter," or the phantom from Forefathers' Eve [Dziady]) weigh upon the conceptualisations of literary studies for more than half a century? What needs did it satisfy? What did the theories that arose then do to their adepts? For I hold that it is not worth troubling ourselves with how to do theory – to borrow the title of Wolfgang Iser's study, How to Do Theory – but rather to consider critically what theories do to us. The modern ones, and the postmodern.
Critical consciousness and self-consciousness are perhaps the most important bond joining literary-scholarly modernity and postmodernity. To attain it, there is no way to "get around" history. Not, however, in order to arrange it – in textbook-fashion – according to "paradigms" (positivist–antipositivist), formations (linguistic–philosophical), "schools" and "currents" (formalism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, semiotics…). Firstly, because the names in use usually appear in the singular, even though one cannot speak of a single, self-identical phenomenology or a uniform structuralism. Secondly, and more importantly, this way of ordering the history of literary research exhausted itself in the second half of the twentieth century, when there began the age of "turns" that continues to this day. Thirdly, and most important of all, critical reflection demands that we consider the very modes of ordering history, rather than its successively changing yet invariably linear organisation. It compels the question of what one can "do" with history. The multiplicity of alternative historiosophical proposals obliges us to ask it.
Critical consciousness and self-consciousness also provoke us to problematise the researching and writing subject. To become aware of one's own location, point of view, and perspective is perhaps the most difficult of self-reflexive tasks. Someone malicious might remark on it: one cannot, like Baron Münchhausen, pull oneself out of the swamp by one's own pigtail. One must consider, however, that point of view and cognitive perspective are cardinal epistemological categories of modernity – not only in the humanities and the arts but also in the exact and natural sciences – akin to relationism (positioning). To renounce them would be to bracket the achievements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And oneself in the bargain.
In his unsurpassed two-volume monograph on modernism (the avant-garde– we shall have to quarrel over these names that circulate interchangeably), Radykalne oko (The Radical Eye), Andrzej Turowski took the journey to be the fundamental metaphor of modernity. He began with the expedition of Witkacy (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz) together with Bronisław Malinowski. This ever-renewed "journey" of the modernists and the postmodernists was, in each instance, a journey toward Otherness. "Otherness," othering – like "strangeness," estrangement (and not Derrida's alone) and dialogue (dialogicity, dialogisation, dialogism) – belong to the elementary lexicon of both generations. Can our literary studies be "othered"? Or is that too risky a challenge? After all, we do live in a "risk society" (Ulrich Beck), and "all that is solid melts into air" (Marshall Berman).
I propose treating the problems indicated here – in such general and even vague terms – as Morris Edward Opler's "cultural themes." They have this advantage over "patterns of culture" that – according to Opler – they also make it possible to set "counter-themes" in motion. And I propose regarding the whole of "our" literary studies as "cultural" – positioning itself "in-between" (as Victor Turner put it, and Edward Said after him): at the junctures and on the borderlands of various (officially demarcated) disciplines (cultural studies, art history, psychology, sociology, medicine…). The "in," for its part, points to the philological art of reading the literary-scholarly text itself – an art attuned to its stylistics and rhetoric, to the historical manner in which an utterance deemed scholarly is shaped.
I invite you to take up a dozen or so such "cultural" themes (some of which I put forward deliberately provocatively). They include, among others:
1/ "From" – "to," or: what to do with history?
2/ Global (cosmopolitan) modernism and multiplied modernisms;
3/ Modernism: the evidential paradigm;
4/ Generations and their cognitive styles;
5/ The travels of theory, or the "travels" of theorists?
6/ Terms and terminoids;
7/ The strangeness of estrangement;
8/ Narratology – narrativism – fabulology: literary studies as literature;
9/ Anthology– ontology– agnotology: on the sources of our (non-)knowledge;
10/ Scholarship and nationality;
11/ The biographical and archival "turns";
12/ The heroes of modern literary studies who have no biography. The scholarly text as a biographical-philological problem;
13/ Schools – circles – coteries: the spaces of literary studies;
14/ World literature and its discomforts (globalism, glocalism, localism).
A precise plan of the meetings, along with selected readings, will be posted on a drive prepared especially for you. It will hold not only the obligatory readings, which will be at the center of our attention, but others as well (who knows? – they might interest someone). The themes and problems may of course change depending on how the meetings unfold.