This essay reflects the author’s interest in understanding the reasons for the growing resistance to theory witnessed over the last couple of decades. The first part attempts to demonstrate that literature and literary theory have been involved in complex dialectical moves between autonomy and heteronomy. The second part focuses on the role of exile in the production and negation of theory; two case studies examine both the potency of theory in exile and the constraints imposed on it. At stake here is gaining insight, through this focus on exile, into the impurity of theory, its pragmatic enmeshments and instability. The author then turns to reflect on the reasons for the current resistance to theory, emphasizing the significant role migration has recently played, as part of a wider constellation of factors, in this process. The text concludes with an examination of (literary) theory as a specifically Western product that has not necessarily had such an intense hold over other, differently constituted cultural zones.
Exilic Inscriptions: Migration and the Resistance to (World) Theory
galin tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London and Chief Research Fellow at igiti, National Research University—Higher School of Economics, Moscow. He is the author of five books and has held visiting appointments at universities in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. Tihanov is an elected member of Academia Europaea, past president of the icla Committee on Literary Theory, and member of the Executive Board of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University; he is also an honorary scientific advisor to the Institute of Foreign Literatures, cass (Beijing). He is currently completing Cosmopolitanism: A Very Short Introduction, commissioned by Oxford University Press.
Galin Tihanov; Exilic Inscriptions: Migration and the Resistance to (World) Theory. differences 1 May 2021; 32 (1): 126–149. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-8956974
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