self-reflexivity

This article reflects upon world literature as a socio-cultural construct behind which one can discern particular historical dynamics and tensions. The first part seeks to locate the Anglo-Saxon discourse of world literature vis-à-vis three major reference points: time, space, and language. This chronotopic interrogation allows me to identify focal points of dissent from the currently prevalent liberal mobilisations of 'world literature'. The second part of the article is attempts to locate world literature on the level of literature's self-reflexivity. This is a specific meta-location of world literature which I examine through close attention to a 1930s novel. This enables me to think about dissent as a meta-reflexive position, from which literature itself skeptically relates to the notion of 'world literature'.

The paper explores the divergent concepts of mimesis in the works of Bulgarian orthodox Marxist philosopher Todor Pavlov and Yuri Lotman, founder of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School. With his Theory of Reflection, completed in Moscow in 1936 as an elaboration of Lenin’s ideas of knowledge, Pavlov became one of the major proponents of the understanding of mimesis as reflection, which for decades defined the dogmatic Marxist-Leninist aesthetics in Eastern Europe. Beginning with the 1960s, Lotman’s conceptualization of dual code structures begins to work in the direction of reloading the mimetic theory beyond the official discourse. Lotman explicitly states that his methodological wager is an attempt to join the formal-structural paradigm of Roman Jacobson and the contextual-dialogical paradigm of Mikhail Bakhtin, which makes his position a synthesis of the two schools that challenged the theory of reflection dogma.