Studying Literary Multilingualism, Revisiting National Philology: Post-Imperial East-Central European Literature as a Testing Ground

This chapter discusses recent theoretical attempts to redefine national philology through a focus on literary multilingualism, by looking at them from the perspective of East-Central European literature, a region “comparative by birth” (Emerson). How, and to what extent, can studies of literary multilingualism function as moves of resistance against the traditional Herderian triad of national language—national identity—national literature? Claims that multilingual literature is subversive per definition need to be interrogated, given that both the monolingualizing impulse of literature and its opening up to the multilingual character of world literature can be traced back to the same source, early German Romanticism. Drawing on Vladimir Biti’s conceptualization of post-imperial literature, particularly on the notion of translatio imperii, it is argued that a number of current developments which scholars of literary multilingualism celebrate as postnational (or postmonolingual) can already be observed in post-imperial East-Central European literature. Vice versa, medievalists remind us that the linguistic is the key to any operation of translatio imperii. If used complementarily, theories of literary multilingualism, post-imperial and world literature can illuminate how the monolingual paradigm in East-Central European literature emerged and how linguistic diversity in individual literary texts was shaped by and responded to the post-imperial condition.