O metodě Dějin literárních kultur středovýchodní Evropy

The article addresses literary historical and comparative methods that are employed in the volumes of History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (2004-) edited by J. Neubauer and M. Cornis-Pope. This project, launched under the auspices of ICLA, is among the earliest and most elaborated realizations of several tenets proposed by recent efforts to renew (comparative) literary historiography, such as: methodological self-reflection, avoidance of totalizing master narratives, synecdochic, mosaic-like, and fragmentary composition, transnational scope, multiperspectivism, topographic approach to complex cultural areas, foregrounding of literature's sociocultural contexts, and search for recurrent, invariant discourses within a variety of national literatures/languages. However, this edition underestimates the textual (including aesthetic) dimension of historical processes. Furthermore, the prevailing method of summing up and framing of merely juxtaposed case studies from various national literatures does not suffice to explain the actual historical inter-connectedness of East-Central European cultures nor their common traits. What is missing, is a more elaborate, systematically employed, and convincing comparative methodology, e.g. of interliterary interference, cultural transfer, cross-cultural intertextuality and the like.