Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur

Ivana Perica is a research fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research (Zfl) in Berlin, Germany. She is co-editor of The Political Uses of Literature: Global Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches, 1920-2020 (Bloombsury, 2024) and author of Die privat-öffentliche Achse des Politischen: Das Unvernehmen zwischen Hannah Arendt und Jacques Rancière (2016).

• List of figuresList of abbreviationsPreface1. IntroductionPart I. The r/evolutionary stalemate2. What’s in a name? Political literature and the politics of literature3. Tropes of conflict and disagreement: Interwar metaphors, post-war metonymiesPart II. Nodal point ‘1928’4. The interwar r/evolutionary controversy5. ‘To marry art to the people’: Viennese hybridity6. Revolutionary pulp fiction: Ernst Fischer’s Lenin (1928) and Der große Verrat (The Great Treason, 1950)7. ‘Literature, too, is a war zone’: Berlin’s literary communism8. The negotiation play: Bertolt Brecht’s Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken, 1930/1931)9. Freedom of art but partisanship of artists: Interwar Prague10. Male capital and its female peripheries: Ivan Olbracht’s O Anne, rusé prolétarce (About Anna, the Red Proletarian, 1925–1926/1928)11. The ‘social literature swindlers’ of Zagreb and Belgrade12. A tableau of exiles: August Cesarec’s Bjegunci (The Fugitives, 1933)Part III. Nodal point ‘1968’13. Cultural revolutions in the West, East, and in-between: Tertium datur?14. Individualistic anarchism as the vanishing point of the 1968 cultural revolution15. The dialectics of and yet: Peter Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance, 1971–1981)16. Socialism with a human face but without socialist literature? Political and literary dissent around the Prague Spring17. Josef Škvorecký’s precursory cynicism: Konec nylonového veku (The End of the Nylon Age, 1967) and Mirákl (The Miracle Game, 1972) 18. ‘Traditions and Perspectives’ of Yugoslav 1968 19. ‘The tragic Tartuffe-like existence of the revolutionary’: Ervin Šinko’s Optimisták (The Optimists, 1954) and Roman jednog romana: Moskovski dnevnik (The Novel of a Novel: Abridged Diary Entries from Moscow, 1935–1937, 1955) 20. A r/evolutionary synthesis: Georg Lukács’s Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen (The Specificity of the Aesthetic, 1963)ReferencesIndex

Meandering between Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Zagreb and Belgrade, Perica’s rich and erudite study seeks a third way beyond the dilemmas of revolution and evolution that shaped leftist writing in Central Europe. This is a compelling contribution, always alert to the political stakes in reconstructing past debates, with their attendant frustrations and hopes.