O espaço literário ibérico na última década: Hipóteses para o estudo das fronteiras e das relações entre sistemas

[Resumo] O capítulo desenvolve um quadro metodológico para a análise das relações entre sistemas literários na península Ibérica. Propõe combinar metodologias sociológicas, sistémicas e espaciais. Sem esquecer os processos históricos, estuda a atuonomia das unidades sistémicas, as planificações literárias, culturais e identitárias, a constituição de centros e periferias, as interferências e os conflitos entre sistemas, ou a definição de fronteiras. Coloca em foco alguns processos e práticas das última década, como uma nova planificação institucional das relações galego-portuguesas, as mudanças no modelo Galeusca ou o reconhecimento da poesia galega no campo literário espanhol.[Abstract] This chapter develops a methodological framework for the analysis of the relationships between literary systems in the Iberian Peninsula. This proposal combines sociological, systemic and spatial methodologies. Without neglecting historical processes, it studies the autonomy of systemic units, literary, cultural and identity planning, the constitution of centres and peripheries, interferences and conflicts between systems, or the definition of boundaries. It focuses on some processes and practices of the last decade, such as new institutional planning for Galician-Portuguese relationships, the changes in the Galeusca model, or the recognition of Galician poetry in the Spanish literary field

Interplaying National and Transnational Perspectives in post-1989 Comparative Literary History

The break-up of the bipolar world system in 1989 has removed the traditional ideological polarizations between East and West, "first" and "second" world, but has to some extent replaced them with nationalistic and ethnocentric perspectives that promote new cultural divisions. Under these circumstances, the input of a mediating consciousness is needed now more than ever. By comparing, translating and interfacing cultures, this type of consciousness can help us rediscover that middle ground between Eastern and Western, dominant and peripheral that we have neglected because of our polarized worldviews. Post-1989 comparative literary history can help us reconstruct that middle ground of intercultural coexistence, emphasizing "transference," "translation," and "cultural con­tact." The multifaceted landscape of East Central Europe, punctuated by multicultural and minority discourses, is an especially fertile ground for a transnational literary history that, while not neglecting the points of conflict, will foreground the conjunctions and crossings between cultures. I test these claims on examples taken from the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, a multi-volume work I am currently co-editing with John Neubauer

European Fiction on the Borders: The Case of Herta Müller

Although European frontiers have often been sites of exchange and contact, their role in national and ideological division is a more pronounced feature of post-1945 continental arrangements. This essay explores the disciplinary function of borders via a study of Herta Müller’s Herztier (The Land of Green Plums, 1994). Set in late Cold War Romania, the novel dramatizes the manner in which the regime’s closed borders helped to shape the identity of the domestic population, conditioning not only public activity, but also the private realms of thought and emotion. As the essay points out, despite the dismantling of the Iron Curtain in 1989, Müller’s text retains its relevance to a ‘Fortress Europe’ still defined by national and ‘civilisational’ boundaries

Speaking and Remaining Silent about the World Beyond

Due to their self-reflexive propensity, postmodern fiction and metafiction, in particular, have been relentlessly criticized of solipsism and of an indifference to relate to the extralinguistic world. While the novel is deemed to pause in its trajectory to examine itself, to examine its conventions and rejections of them, to address its future uncertainties and its at-present struggles, it has become a misprision that all it can bestow to its readers is an understanding of itself. The basic argument unravels as follows: language is devoid of reality, therefore, literature does not contain reality either; now more than ever, fiction recognizes that it is a self-contained artifact which can only engage in a representation of itself, having no interest in proffering its readers anything but an understanding of itself. The novel in the postmodern period has faced the crisis of representation, when linguists and theorists alike unmask the insufficiency of language and its inability to represent reality. Under the scrutiny of language, metafiction emerges; a fiction which is more than ever aware of the inadequacies of its medium, and which is conscious of its subsequent inability to represent the world; hence the conclusions that all its pronouncements can only be about itself. This view delimits the possibilities of (meta)fiction, whose nature is apparently more intricate: while recognizing the distance between itself and reality, while shifting the emphasis from reality to itself, literature can never only be about itself; even if it attempts to repudiate the world, the world will forever be part of what makes literature possible