Procedures of Resistance

This volume explores the state of literary theory today, decades after the repeatedly proclaimed end of theory. It builds on the idea that theory is historically constituted as it is “always becoming something else” as Leslie Fiedler claimed in the 1950s, arguing that the historical constitution of theory relies on theory’s procedural nature. In order to assess theory’s procedural challenge to the fundamental notions that all the disciplines within an episteme have brought to the fore, it addresses these questions: What are the procedures theory has relied on? Are they a secret to its resistance, or is resistance its primary procedure? And if so, a resistance to what? Secondly, if resistance were theory’s principal vehicle, at which point does resistance, conceptualized only procedurally (as resisting something, questioning anything, criticizing whatever), display hallmarks of a disciplinary closure that must call for new resistances, and perhapsfor a fundamentally another kind? The book turns to what theory does in order to avoid a partial answer to what theory is.

Davor Beganović is Lecturer in the Slavic Department of the University of Tübingen and a Research Fellow at the Slavic Department of the University of Münster, Germany. He is the author of Pripovijedanje bez kraja: "Hrvatska pripovjedačka Bosna" od Ive Andrića do Nebojše Lujanovića (2022). Zrinka Božić is an Associate Professor of Literary Theory and History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She is the author of The Community in Avant-Garde Literature and Politics (2022). Andrea Milanko is an Assistant Professor of Literary Theory and History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She is the author of Pripovjedna proza Slobodana Novaka (forthcoming).  Ivana Perica is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), Berlin, Germany, and author of Die privat-öffentliche Achse des Politischen: Das Unvernehmen zwischen Hannah Arendt und Jacques Rancière (2016).