Review Article 363 REVIEW ARTICLE REVISITING RURITANIA AND VULGARIA: THREE INVITATIONS FOR A DIAL... more Review Article 363 REVIEW ARTICLE REVISITING RURITANIA AND VULGARIA: THREE INVITATIONS FOR A DIALOG Nikita Nankov, Indiana University, Bloomington Andrew Baruch Wachtel. Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. ...
This essay is a hermeneutic test of Geo Milev’s cultural discovery of what in Bulgaria is perceiv... more This essay is a hermeneutic test of Geo Milev’s cultural discovery of what in Bulgaria is perceived as the Western modernist Other: Germany and England. The inquiry presented here rests on the fundamental assumption of phenomenological and Gadamerian hermeneutics that practical life precedes theorizing this life. My goal is to challenge, through Milev’s representative case, one central notion in Bulgarian literary and cultural history, namely, the Western, European character of Bulgarian modernism. I test the belief that in the era of Bulgarian modernism – the 1890s to the 1920s1 – the economically and culturally backward Bulgarian Self became the same as the advanced Western Other, which, self-flatteringly, Bulgarian intellectuals thought of as a better Bulgarian Self with which Bulgaria could equate itself in the near future, thus regaining what they deemed to be its true nature, which had been distorted first by Ottoman rule (1396–1878) and later by Communism (1944–1989). Borrowing from Ricoeur,2 the goal of the article can be expressed as engaging a philosophical, historical, cultural and political framework. There are three possible relations between the Self (Milev himself and Milev as a synecdoche of Bulgarian modernism) and the Other (modernism in Germany and England and Western modernism in general). In the first relation, the Self and the Other are completely different, and the Self is totally dissimilar from and unrelated to the Other. This was the position of Bulgarian pseudo-Marxists, who, from the mid-1940s to mid-1970s, tried to shortchange the role of modernism in Bulgarian culture and present realism and socialist realism as forming the mainstream of Bulgarian literature and to depict Bulgaria as a faithful ally of the Soviet Union. In the second relation, the Self is like the Other. Seen from this perspective, Milev as a Westernizer and Bulgarian
What is the function of narrativity in the production of theoretical postmodern texts and discour... more What is the function of narrativity in the production of theoretical postmodern texts and discourses in the humanities? Can these texts and discourses be viewed as verbal artifacts? The formulation of these questions is influenced by those theorists who are interested in narratives as formed solely on the plane of the relationship sign-sign and who lock in parenthesis the ontological link between signs and referents (an approach that, potentially at least, could always swerve to theoretical idealism and social conformism).1 What I mean by discourse here is the term’s narratological content: “the ‘how’ of a narrative as opposed to its ‘what’” (Prince 21). The “how” and the “what” are tools of theoretical abstraction that should not be absolutely separated, because the “how” is the “what” and vice versa. My main point is that despite the attempts of many recent theoretical texts to scrutinize narrativity critically and in the case of the most self-conscious and ingenious among them to emancipate themselves from it by trying to create a new, nonnarrative type of theoretical and critical discourse, many
This analysis of Chekhov’s short story “The Little Joke” (“Shutochka”) and the long-short story “... more This analysis of Chekhov’s short story “The Little Joke” (“Shutochka”) and the long-short story “The Kiss” (“Potselui”) postulates that when this writer’s work is viewed as an epitome of modernity, that is, the last two and a half centuries of Western intellectual and artistic life, it is revealing to interpret his prose fiction by way of a poetics based on certain phenomenological and existentialist premises. According to this philosophical tradition, the non-human is identical with itself because it does not change. Conversely, the human is non-identical with itself because human beings constantly create themselves by means of their free choices and actions, and thus always alter and transcend themselves. The paradox of human identity and non-identity with oneself expresses also contrariety: if something is simultaneously identical and non-identical with itself, it is self-contradictory, ambivalent, and ambiguous. The main point of my analysis is to show that through various narra...
Signore e Signori, welcome to the show! I mean the one-man show “Drafts” by Parthenos/Virgo Resto... more Signore e Signori, welcome to the show! I mean the one-man show “Drafts” by Parthenos/Virgo Restored and Presented by Virginia Stoianova or, more briefly, “Drafts” by Virginia. As you see, it consists of 35 sketches by the young Bulgarian artist Virginia Stoianova (“Virzhiniia,” in Bulgarian) and a concept by me. The exhibition takes place in March 1994 in the Lessedra gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria, which was ranked as the best private gallery in the country for 1991, 1992, and 1993 by Kultura, the leading weekly newspaper for culture. The show is a hoax: the obviously contemporary drawings are accompanied by purported scholarly documents which present them as Protorenaissance works. Taken in by the concept, the visitors and the media become involuntary participants in and propagators of the mystification, thus turning it into a piece of performance art on a national scale. The exhibition, which entwines visual art, performance, literature, and philosophy, both artistically challenges and critically analyzes some mental, social, and cultural paradigms in postcommunist Bulgaria. Its success comes from the fact that some widespread Bulgarian fantasies and assumptions about their national cultural identity are enacted as real. In Act One, I present the concept of the exhibition as outlined in the pseudo-scholarly documents which frame the drawings. In Act Two, I review the reaction of the public and the media. Finally, in Act Three, I offer a revised English version of an article I wrote in Bulgaria, which analyzes the meaning of the show and its cultural repercussions, and which ends the performance.
Review Article 363 REVIEW ARTICLE REVISITING RURITANIA AND VULGARIA: THREE INVITATIONS FOR A DIAL... more Review Article 363 REVIEW ARTICLE REVISITING RURITANIA AND VULGARIA: THREE INVITATIONS FOR A DIALOG Nikita Nankov, Indiana University, Bloomington Andrew Baruch Wachtel. Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. ...
This essay is a hermeneutic test of Geo Milev’s cultural discovery of what in Bulgaria is perceiv... more This essay is a hermeneutic test of Geo Milev’s cultural discovery of what in Bulgaria is perceived as the Western modernist Other: Germany and England. The inquiry presented here rests on the fundamental assumption of phenomenological and Gadamerian hermeneutics that practical life precedes theorizing this life. My goal is to challenge, through Milev’s representative case, one central notion in Bulgarian literary and cultural history, namely, the Western, European character of Bulgarian modernism. I test the belief that in the era of Bulgarian modernism – the 1890s to the 1920s1 – the economically and culturally backward Bulgarian Self became the same as the advanced Western Other, which, self-flatteringly, Bulgarian intellectuals thought of as a better Bulgarian Self with which Bulgaria could equate itself in the near future, thus regaining what they deemed to be its true nature, which had been distorted first by Ottoman rule (1396–1878) and later by Communism (1944–1989). Borrowing from Ricoeur,2 the goal of the article can be expressed as engaging a philosophical, historical, cultural and political framework. There are three possible relations between the Self (Milev himself and Milev as a synecdoche of Bulgarian modernism) and the Other (modernism in Germany and England and Western modernism in general). In the first relation, the Self and the Other are completely different, and the Self is totally dissimilar from and unrelated to the Other. This was the position of Bulgarian pseudo-Marxists, who, from the mid-1940s to mid-1970s, tried to shortchange the role of modernism in Bulgarian culture and present realism and socialist realism as forming the mainstream of Bulgarian literature and to depict Bulgaria as a faithful ally of the Soviet Union. In the second relation, the Self is like the Other. Seen from this perspective, Milev as a Westernizer and Bulgarian
What is the function of narrativity in the production of theoretical postmodern texts and discour... more What is the function of narrativity in the production of theoretical postmodern texts and discourses in the humanities? Can these texts and discourses be viewed as verbal artifacts? The formulation of these questions is influenced by those theorists who are interested in narratives as formed solely on the plane of the relationship sign-sign and who lock in parenthesis the ontological link between signs and referents (an approach that, potentially at least, could always swerve to theoretical idealism and social conformism).1 What I mean by discourse here is the term’s narratological content: “the ‘how’ of a narrative as opposed to its ‘what’” (Prince 21). The “how” and the “what” are tools of theoretical abstraction that should not be absolutely separated, because the “how” is the “what” and vice versa. My main point is that despite the attempts of many recent theoretical texts to scrutinize narrativity critically and in the case of the most self-conscious and ingenious among them to emancipate themselves from it by trying to create a new, nonnarrative type of theoretical and critical discourse, many
This analysis of Chekhov’s short story “The Little Joke” (“Shutochka”) and the long-short story “... more This analysis of Chekhov’s short story “The Little Joke” (“Shutochka”) and the long-short story “The Kiss” (“Potselui”) postulates that when this writer’s work is viewed as an epitome of modernity, that is, the last two and a half centuries of Western intellectual and artistic life, it is revealing to interpret his prose fiction by way of a poetics based on certain phenomenological and existentialist premises. According to this philosophical tradition, the non-human is identical with itself because it does not change. Conversely, the human is non-identical with itself because human beings constantly create themselves by means of their free choices and actions, and thus always alter and transcend themselves. The paradox of human identity and non-identity with oneself expresses also contrariety: if something is simultaneously identical and non-identical with itself, it is self-contradictory, ambivalent, and ambiguous. The main point of my analysis is to show that through various narra...
Signore e Signori, welcome to the show! I mean the one-man show “Drafts” by Parthenos/Virgo Resto... more Signore e Signori, welcome to the show! I mean the one-man show “Drafts” by Parthenos/Virgo Restored and Presented by Virginia Stoianova or, more briefly, “Drafts” by Virginia. As you see, it consists of 35 sketches by the young Bulgarian artist Virginia Stoianova (“Virzhiniia,” in Bulgarian) and a concept by me. The exhibition takes place in March 1994 in the Lessedra gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria, which was ranked as the best private gallery in the country for 1991, 1992, and 1993 by Kultura, the leading weekly newspaper for culture. The show is a hoax: the obviously contemporary drawings are accompanied by purported scholarly documents which present them as Protorenaissance works. Taken in by the concept, the visitors and the media become involuntary participants in and propagators of the mystification, thus turning it into a piece of performance art on a national scale. The exhibition, which entwines visual art, performance, literature, and philosophy, both artistically challenges and critically analyzes some mental, social, and cultural paradigms in postcommunist Bulgaria. Its success comes from the fact that some widespread Bulgarian fantasies and assumptions about their national cultural identity are enacted as real. In Act One, I present the concept of the exhibition as outlined in the pseudo-scholarly documents which frame the drawings. In Act Two, I review the reaction of the public and the media. Finally, in Act Three, I offer a revised English version of an article I wrote in Bulgaria, which analyzes the meaning of the show and its cultural repercussions, and which ends the performance.
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