Exploring New Avenues Beyond Literary Historicism: A Cross-Temporal and Cross-Cultural Dialogue Between American Posthistoricism and Slavic Literary Theory

Abstract

This study works toward filling the Slavic blind spot in American literary posthistoricist discourse. Drawing upon Rita Felski’s onslaught on historicist contextualism, Russell Berman’s refutation of periodization in literary studies, and Wai Chee Dimock’s manifesto for a diachronic (post)historicism, it argues that these paradigms have shown a high degree of territorial confinement and would do better to engage with Slavic theories on literature. Given the centrality of the act of reception in posthistoricist perspectives on literature, the article posits the reception-oriented theories of the Prague School of Literary Studies and the Polish School of Literary Communication as the representative Slavic voices for symbiotic transactions with American posthistoricism(s). The resonant interactions the study orchestrates between these literary-theoretical paradigms across a spatial and temporal chasm pave the way for an amplified riposte to the hegemony of various historicizing tendencies in contemporary literary scholarship. The article does not limit itself to the mere refutation of literary historicism but also outlines a few posthistoricist directions that future literary/cultural scholarship could take. These alternatives, pivoting around the figure of the lay reader, could lead to the proliferation of studies on the history of reading and the dynamics of canon formation while questioning the viability of academically mandated interpretations of literary/cultural texts driven by the historicizing imperative.