Exilic Inscriptions: Mobility and the Resistance to Theory

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom webinar and streamed via YouTube Live. There will be no in-person event.

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Please join us for a presentation by Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London, as part of the seminar series Red Migrations: Marxism and Transnational Mobility After 1917, organized by Philip Gleissner and Bradley Gorski.

• “The resistance to theory” is a title of a 1982 essay by Paul de Man (later included in his eponymous book). But in this talk, it serves as no more than a homophonic fillip to begin to think about exile, mobility, and the complex, often contrasting, ways in which they work to facilitate the generation, inscription, or forsaking of theory.

• In this talk, Galin Tihanov will reflect on exile and mobility, focusing in on their historically attested capacity to generate theoretically valid discourses. In line with the theme of “Marxism and Transnational Mobility after 1917”, Tihanov will include a couple of cases from the time after World War I. Finally, he will consider the phenomena of globalisation and mass migration today, investigating whether and how they might be linked to the current wave of resistance to theory.

Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He has held visiting appointments at universities in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. He is the author of five monographs, including The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2019). Tihanov’s research interests range from Russian, German, and Central-European intellectual history to world literature, cultural theory, cosmopolitanism, and exile. He is 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 (IWL) at Harvard University; he is also honorary scientific advisor to the Institute of Foreign Literatures, CASS (Beijing). He is currently writing Cosmopolitanism: A Very Short Introduction, commissioned by Oxford UP.