Form and Instability: Eastern Europe, Literature, Postimperial Difference

233 Pages·2015·3.691 MB·English

by  Anita Starosta

Form and Instability
8
flashpoints
The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly
national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their
historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books
engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without
falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the
humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence
and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how
literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in
how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles
are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints.
series editors:
Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Founding Editor;
Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding
Editor; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown
University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and
European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator; Catherine Gallagher
(English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Nouri Gana (Comparative Literature
and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Literature,
UC Santa Cruz); Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
A complete list of titles is on page 222.
Form and Instability
Eastern Europe, Literature, Postimperial Difference
Anita Starosta
northwestern university press ❘ evanston, illinois
this book is made possible by a collaborative grant
from the andrew w. mellon foundation.
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright © 2016 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2016.
All rights reserved.
Digital Printing
isbn 978-0-8101-3202-3 paper
isbn 978-0-8101-3259-7 cloth
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available from the Library of
Congress.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ansi z39.4811992.
Ojcu, zamiast pożegnania

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
part one
Frames of Intelligibility
1. The Passing of Eastern Europe: Area Studies and Rhetoric 23
2. Strategies of Accession: Europe and Deixis 47
part two
Conditions of Legibility
3. The Right Accent: Europe, Irony, and Conrad’s Long Silences 75
4. Countries of Degraded Form: Reading Gombrowicz 101
5. Europe after Eurocentrism: Translating Tischner’s
Góral Philosophy 138
Conclusion 163
Notes 167
Bibliography 199
Index 217

Acknowledgments
How do you start at the beginning, if things happen before they happen?
clarice lispector, The Hour of the Star
To acknowledge others’ help and inspiration is also to locate origins.
Here, I am obliged to name only the most direct, the ones I can be
sure of. And so this book owes much to Wlad Godzich, who seems
to have always already been there. In her seminar “Transfigurations,”
Teresa de Lauretis first taught me to connect translation and figuration
and more than once pointed me in the right direction. James Clifford’s
teaching has had a gradual and long-acting influence as I have come
to recognize in his work what I may have learned from him, without
realizing it, in the first place: the value of instability, open-endedness.
Gina Dent and Neferti Tadiar showed me how to seek out difficulty in
the silence that happens when incongruous discourses and objects are
made to confront one another—to take stammering as a sign of mean-
ingfulness yet to be found. All of this built on the work of my previ-
ous teachers: María Antonia Garcés and David Grossvogel, along with
the late Don Fredericksen and Dick Neisser, at Cornell; and Andrzej
Dąbrowski and Ewa Radziwinowicz still earlier.
I’ve been privileged to be part of two intellectual communities that
have sustained much of my work since graduate school. One of these
is the editorial collective of the journal boundary 2, where Paul Bové’s
generosity and friendship, and frequent conversations with scholars
including Aamir Mufti, R. A. Judy, Hortense Spillers, Nancy Condee,
Manisha Basu, Nergis Ertürk, Ruth Hung, and Rich Purcell have made
it a home. The other community consists of Neda Atanasoski, Kalindi