Over the last two years, four book-length reconstructions of the pre-WWII Socialist Republic of Letters have come out, which have collectively shifted the emphasis away from the Republic’s more familiar centers of Paris, Berlin, and New York and towards its lesser-documented but vital (often “Eastern”) networks: Katerina Clark, Eurasia without Borders (Harvard UP, Dec. 2021) Edward Tyerman, The Internationalist Aesthetic: China and Early Soviet Culture (Columbia UP, Dec. 2021) Amelia Glaser, Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard UP, October 2020) and a volume edited by Amelia Glaser and Steven S. Lee, Comintern Aesthetics (Toronto UP, March 2020) In the process of introducing them, in this roundtable, their authors will also introduce us to a geopoetics and a radical aesthetics, which for a few decades posed a major challenge to the dominant modes of literary valuation, circulation, and worlding, but the memory of which has been erased since.
New York City, NY; NYC