Founded in 2005, Translit is a literary-critical anthology, publishing outfit and community of poets, philosophers and humanities scholars. The editors of the anthology aim to bring forward various fields of confrontation in contemporary literary theory and the literary process. The first issue was devoted to the gender framework of poetry; the second to the “role of personality” in poetics; the third to the forms and features of the co-production of texts and reality; the fourth sought to investigate the forms of contemporary poetry’s social being in the context of its (poetry’s) secularization. The fifth issue asked the question, “Who is speaking?”, which nowadays implies a mapping of the intra-poetic (narratological) registers of speech production, as well as inevitably necessitating an investigation into the interrelationship of the speaking subject with instantiations of language and ideology. The following double issue (6/7) was devoted to investigation into the contingencies and obstacles involved in a transition from the rejection of the non-aesthetic (“everyday life”, byt) towards the active appropriation of this non-classical material. This process assumes a reassessment of aesthetic methods and is to a certain extent capable of leading to the transformation of art’s social functions as well. The latest, eighth issue of Translit presents an attempt to view literature as anthropological experience, cultural institution and social practice. The authors emphasize that they are primarily interested in the “transition from the investigation of literary facts belonging to an aesthetic series, to the analysis of the interactions between series and, first and foremost, between art and the socially political context”.

Translit has published texts by authors including the writers Anton Ochirov, Roman Osminkin, Kirill Medvedev, Aleksandr Skidan, Valery Nugatov, Andrei Rodionov, Andrei Sen-Senkov, Dmitry Golynko-Volfson, Marianna Geide, Alla Gorbunova, Maria Stepanova, Gali-Dana Zinger, Daria Sukhovei and Evgeny Rits; the philosophers Keti Chukhrov and Aleksandr Smuliansky; and the scholars Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Ray, Tatiana Venediktova, Igor Chubarov, Ilya Kalinin and Sergei Ermakov

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In December, 2010 was published Translit #8

Literature: à lateral view

In this issue of Translit, we have decided to look at literature not only from various angles (which implies an apparently objective picture), but also from unexpected ones; to activate methodological approaches often considered outrageous by the writing profession. We have decided to complicate the facade of literature, riddled as it is with questions of craft and stylistic devices, by means of some less popular perspectives; in particular, we have tried to take a view of literature as a certain anthropological experience, as cultural institution and social practice. The method of strictly immanent analysis (of evolution) of artistic forms, crowned “Formalism,” was also overcome by it in the later work of Tynyanov and Eikhenbaum. It was they who postulated the transition from investigation of literary facts belonging to the aesthetic series to an analysis of interaction between series – first and foremost, between art and the sociopolitical context.
Thus, the new issue both furthers the theoretical line of some material from the previous issue (“The Style of Fact and the Fact of Style”), while thematizing the working premise of the Kraft series (founded in collaboration with the Free Marxist Press), which states that “sensitivity to the material quality of language and the opacity of form” – something imputed to writers – “given a certain progression, leads [them] to an analysis of the material level of art’s day-to-day existence and the opacity of its relationship with society and, consequently, to a reassessment of the boundary between ‘art’ and ‘what has nothing to do with art.’”

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In April, 2010 was published Translit #6-7:

The Style of the Fact and the Fact of Style

This issue of the almanac deals with the historical reconstruction and analysis of the conceptual complications that arise when literature characteristically strives to grasp “truth itself” and “life in its immediacy” — that is, when it turns to the non-classical aesthetic material to which every “poet of modern life” tacitly lays claim. This choice involves a switch from rejection of the an-aesthetic (“everyday life”) to its active appropriation. It likewise entails a revaluation of aesthetic methods, which in the extreme case can lead to a transformation of art’s social functions.
To begin with, however, we have to evaluate the complication generated by the fact that any passion for the real inevitably hinges on the question of our tools for encountering reality and thus on the question of its nature. While the mimetic arts encourage us to succumb to the illusion that a zero degree of the material’s deformability might exist, the question of the “natural” verisimilitude of linguistic expressions is considerably more complicated from the start, if not altogether meaningless. In reality, no absolute, non-conventionalized realism is possible even with the use of analogical codes. Like any language (and all the more so in the case of the “natural sign system”), the language of painting or cinema has to be mastered first in order to understand what is said in it and (realizing all its conditional character) to assess the degree to which it is “realistic.” The problem of realism is thus radically grounded in the question of codes and, in the case of art, in the dynamic of the conventions observed by its languages.
The realism of writing (already delimited from the epistemological principle) can be understood as the pendulum-like movement between “artlessness” and “madeness” as the convention of reception is renewed. Regardless of whether they were figurative or literal, yesterday’s words mean nothing today. Both metaphors and the “proper names” of things are thus equally capable of performing the shifts and deformations that give us the gift of perceiving reality. As long as we limit ourselves to the degree to which a description of reality is realistic, however, we will be unable to exit the vicious circle traced by the combinatoire of intralinguistic devices, whereas the Marxist criterion of praxis complicates or displaces this question and enables us to shift from an analysis of how ideas are organized to an analysis of how material things and processes are organized. The literature of fact was thus fundamentally different from all other tendencies towards artlessness because it transformed artistic relations of production themselves instead of naturalizing the fabrications of language.
Any appeal to “immediate reality” is thus already ideological if only because it strives to naturalize representation and conceal the mechanisms of rhetoric’s (de)formative work. Access to the material world beyond the unreflexive turn to “facts themselves” is possible, however, not via an analysis of the represented, but via an analysis of the practices that frame representation and ideological production in general.

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In May, 2009 was published Translit #5.

Who is speaking?

The notion that the work of art is a space where a sovereign will expresses itself has long ago been debunked. According to this notion, the artwork reveals traces of this will, which underwrites its utterance. Despite this debunking, as well as the deconstruction of the bourgeois subject and the destabilization of the category of authorship that were carried out in the sixties, the question that serves as the theme of this issue of Translit (a question first asked by Nietzsche) remains legitimate. Today, however, it presupposes a mapping of the intrapoetic (narratological) registers of speech production, as well as the consequently urgent necessity of investigating the relationship between the subject of the speech act and the authority of language and ideology.
Since antiquity, (lyric) poetry has been thought to be a much too direct form of utterance—that is, a nonfictional form in which the implicit author critically collapses into his biographical counterpart. It was thus even excluded from classical poetics. Only when poetry’s utilitarian potential was drowned in the nontransitivity of modernist writing did the lyric enter poetics and a specifically regulated poetic idiom become a criterion for literariness. Ever since then, any claim to direct poetic utterance has necessitated extensive commentary and aroused theoretical suspicion. The realm of subjective discourse is contrasted with “objective” diegesis and mimesis precisely by virtue of the unconditional, declarative recognition that there is promise in one’s own vision. After “objectivity” has been put paid to, this enables one to generate radically performative speech from the site of one’s autonomy. This discourse (unlike narrative) does not attempt to disguise the face of the speaker with either the consensus of depicted reality or the fascism of language. On the contrary, this face presents the most problematic area of its utterance as its sole guarantee.
Another means of thematizing the heterogeneity of speech and the inevitability of the Other’s presence within it is free indirect discourse broadly understood. This strategy is heir to the Aristotelian dramaturgical tradition, in which viewpoints are dispersed and the author’s sovereign will is delegated to various enunciating subjects even to the point of transmitting the truth of “things themselves.” But even this discursive strategy is not free of the suspicion that it has been infected by the discourse of power. For every conceptual declaration of repressed social idioms—every innovative montage of someone else’s speech—not only opposes one symbolic hierarchy to another or only the possibility of others, but also produces a distinct subject effect. Even when he demonstrates the deficit of democracy in language and conspicuously sacrifices himself, the bricoleur succeeds in acting as someone who has the right to this manipulation and in appropriating a certain quantity of the “power of naming.”
Thus, speech is as pre-given for the subject as is language, but it is determined by other social phenomena, historical in nature—ideological formations that produce corresponding discursive formations. The principal blind spot of every discourse is the construction of the subject per se. It is this subject that all ideologies address as their inalienable component.

Issue in â pdf

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	In October, 2008 was published Translit #4 Secularisation of literature This is already the fourth issue of the poetry and essay almanac Translit. Its aim is to once more draw the reader’s attention to a particular conflict in the modern literary process. The first issue concerned the gender aspect of poetry; the second dealt with the role of personality; the third, with the intercausation of text and reality. This fourth issue strives to investigate the forms of modern poetry’s social existence via the concept of the secularization of literature. Two seemingly hostile camps — the culture industry and elitist (“contemporary”) art — are products of the partial breakdown of the avant-garde project, which combined the principles of innovation and accessibility. The culture industry, which transformed accessibility into the enforced imperative to consume, is a super-intensive conductor of the dominant ideology, whereas elitist art (usually disguised under less objectionable names) is a more indirect conductor. It lets its agents in the field believe that they can preserve their own pure outlook as they increase art’s supply of precedents. Functionality is thus reduced to the instrumentalization of reception, whereas innovation is entangled in the internal game of scandalizing the establishment. This scheme is also applicable to the current condition of literature. This compels us to problematize the contradiction between the current tendency to auratize poetry in conditions of total communication and the project of its secularization, which inherits the tradition of such avant-garde tendencies of the early twentieth century as “production literature” and the “literature of fact.” The sovereign flashiness of the modernist utterance is thus opposed to the effectiveness of functional poetics, which overcomes the very autonomy of literature by creating constructive utopian messages and direct critical statements. By wielding its sacral status and instrumentalizing its own autonomy, such literature specializes not only in the hermeneutics of social reality but also tries to overcome the institutional limits of literature as such, thus establishing direct contact with reality and producing instruments of knowledge and resistance. When the talk turns to political power, contemporary literature usually pulls its hand away from the flame, although it always affects a reliance on power, trying to channel it into a tautological affirmation of the autonomous zones of its own symbolic influence, which is easily converted into exchange value. Secularized literature, on the contrary, is well aware of the fact that each artistic statement is an act of modeling social reality, i.e., a performative act. It cannot continue to propagate the myth of the artist’s autonomy — the myth that the artist has evolved from disobeying the dominant discourse to a frozen pose of incoherence and independence from all contexts. Issue in pdf