Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur - by Ivana Perica (Hardcover)

About the Book

A comparative study of the political-literary scenes between 1928-1968 in Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Zagreb, and Belgrade that reveals an imagined 'third-way' within the context of organized political binaries in Eastern and Western Europe.

Book Synopsis

Offers an alternate framing of the literary and political afterlives of revolution between 1928-1968 in Eastern and Western Europe.

Politics, Literature and Tertium Daturcombines the transfer of ideas between historical turning points with a comparative reading of political literatures in the European East and West to address the disparity between the abundance of scholarly accounts of 1968 and the simultaneous forgetting of developments in the interwar period that peaked around 1928. It deepens scholarly awareness of the transnational spaces of interwar literature and explores their afterlives in the post-World War II period.

The book troubles and corrects Western European theories of 1968 by tracing the post-war afterlives of shared interwar experiences that point towards a socialist third way, or Georg Lukács' tertium datur, and thus out of the conventionally understood East-West binary. It testifies to the existence of a literature that throughout the last century self-consciously oscillated between the exigencies of organized politics and the aesthetic task of helping to shape the humanity of tomorrow.

Examining case studies of works by Bertolt Brecht, Ivan Olbracht and August Cesarec among others, Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur excavates a series of problems, optics and styles characteristic of the forgotten episodes of 20th-century literary history. It shows that the proverbial Iron Curtain was not impenetrable, and that the walls and borders erected in the post-war period could not completely suppress the reverberations and revival of projects that flourished in the political-literary metropolises of the interwar period.

Review Quotes

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.
Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London, UK

About the Author

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).