Towards Paired Histories of Small Literatures, To Make Them Communicate

Abstract

The A. suggests a geo-cultural relocation of Bulgarian literature, within an agenda of reforming comparative literature studies. First, comparative literature should develop an awareness of the cultural worlds which, being neither metropolitan nor colonial, benefited insubstantially from the post-colonial turn in humanities. It should leave the “universalist” perspective behind and commit to a “communitarianist” perspective, trying a synthesis between Dionýz Ďurišin’s theory of interliterary communities and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural field. In a pragmatical communitarianist epistemology experts affiliated to scholarly institutions belonging to, for example, the Black Sea states, should start producing expertise on the Black Sea region. This may lead to overcoming the neo-colonised status of, for example, Bulgarian scholarship vis-à-vis the international division of scholarly labour and, subsequently, to a reformed state of the collective mind of the Bulgarian cultural field. Such a geo-cultural relocation of Bulgarian literature to a hypothetic cross-Black Sea interliterary community, or at least neighbourhood, could be both a means for and a side-effect of the invoked act of emancipation.