MOH VI final conference booklet
International Board: Rens Bod, Christopher Celenza, Hent de Vries, Julia Kursell, Fenrong
Liu, Jaap Maat, Helen Small, Thijs Weststeijn
Local Organizing Committee: Helen Small, Hampus Östh Gustafsson, Laura Miller
The Society for the History of the Humanities
29th September 2017, Brittain Williams Room
Invisible Battles: The Political Stakes of Literary Theory in Eastern Europe
Chair: Julia Kursell (University of Amsterdam)
• Darin Tenev (University of Sofia “St. Kl. Ohridski”), Language Models and the Study of
Literature (Bulgarian Guillaumist School vs. Roland Barthes and the Saussurean Legacy)
• Kamelia Spassova (University of Sofia “St. Kl. Ohridski”), Transforming the Concept of
Mimesis: Yuri Lotman and Todor Pavlov
• Enyo Stoyanov (University of Sofia “St. Kl. Ohridski”), Lines of Dissention: The Political
Dimensions of Bakhtin’s Early Reception
• Maria Kalinova (University of Sofia “St. Kl. Ohridski”), Ideology Behind Our Back:
Ideologeme and Aesthetic Event
• Miglena Nikolchina (University of Sofia “St. Kl. Ohridski”), Literary Theory in Action: the
Case of Metamorphosis
Kamelia Spassova (University of Sofia “St. Kl. Ohridski”),
Transforming the Concept of Mimesis: Yuri Lotman and Todor Pavlov
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 as the reflection of reality, Todor Pavlov became one of the major proponents of the understanding of mimesis as mimetic reflection, which for decades defined the dogmatic Marxist-Leninist aesthetics in Eastern Europe. Beginning with the 1960s, Yuri Lotman’s conceptualization of dual code structures is in the direction of reloading the mimetic theory beyond the official discourse. He explicitly states that his methodological wager is an attempt to connect 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.
Maria Kalinova (University of Sofia “St. Kl. Ohridski”),
Ideology Behind Our Back: Ideologeme and Aesthetic Event
The paper will address the return to the question of authorial intentions in the writing of the Circle of Bakhtin as an opportunity for de-ideologizing the internal and the external context of the work of art. The concept of the author is unfolded as participating in the formulation of both the concept of “ideology” (Marxism and Philosophy of language, 1929) and the concept of “unconscious” (Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, 1927 ), which allowed designating the author’s intentions with the neologism “ideologeme.” Voloshinov introduces the concept of ideologeme in conjunction with the historical framework that accompanies and traverses statements; later on, Julia Kristeva will examine the transformative force of the same concept in her text “From Symbol to Sign” (1969). In counter distinction to both lines of development, Bulgarian theoretician Nikola Georgiev uses ideologeme as an antonym of dialogue – in the sense of a totalizing and universal explanatory model, i.e. métarécit, “master narrative” in Lyotard’s terms. His critical approach presupposes a different take on the problem of the aesthetic event, whose intuitions will be traced in this analysis.
Dualis 