On February 17, 2019, a regular meeting of the inter-university Seminar Affects of Presence was held at the Centaur Bookstore.
The seminar was attended by faculty from RSUH, Moscow State University, the Higher School of Economics and representatives of the Anti-University public education initiative.
The report of the meeting, delivered by RSUH Professor Alexander Markov, was dedicated to the crisis of «new historicism». The merits of «new historicism» and its fathers, philosopher Richard Rorty, philologist Stephen Greenblatt and others, are indisputable, as the experts were able to reconstruct the emotional contexts of ideas.
The speaker pointed out the connection between the new historicism and microhistory, which is also attentive to details and emotions associated with them. The speaker showed that constructivism, as seen by new historicism, sometimes absolutizes dialogue and dialogicism, and is prone to being grotesque and caricaturesque, disputing the pan-semiotic nature of structuralists and poststructuralists, and is apt to to give individual phenomena a privileged status.
Having examined the interpretations of Shakespeare’s «Tempest» by Greenblatt or reactions to the Lisbon earthquake by L. Tavares, the speaker concluded that these interpretations were based on a polemic with the early Derrida, but that they did not take into account the achievements of the late, politically engaged Derrida, who had begun to participate in socio-political life .
The report also examined the «Russian version» of the new historicism, in particular, the interpretation of the legacy of Yuri Tynyanov, and showed how the lack of clarity in a number of methodological issues affected current disputes.
The speaker concluded by describing the critics’ reactions to the bestselling book by Alexander Arkhipov and Anna Kirzyuk «Dangerous Soviet Things», showing that unresolved methodology questions often belie unresolved issues of research.
Dr. Evgenia Vorobyeva, Associate Professor of the RSUH, Dr. Victoria Faibyshenko, Associate Professor of Siberian Federal University and others took part in the discussion.
