Literary Journalism in the Cold War: Affective Structures of Transperipheral Solidarity in Thought-Images between Ryszard Kapuściński and Gabriel García Márquez

• Applicant: Joanna Moszczynska, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 493493408

In my project, I would like to explore the aesthetic-cultural and political content of literary-journalistic texts of Ryszard Kapuściński and Gabriel García Márquez, and contribute to the comparative study of the poetics of of Cold War literary journalism. With regard to the Latin American research debate on the history of the chronicle in the region (as a particular genre of literary journalism), my cross-cultural approach can serve as a starting point for transhistorical literary studies. I would also like to extend the questions of whether it is the 'proto-genre' of written culture in Latin America, or whether it is only about the continuity of the term or a discursive function of the genre, to the Eastern European context and create a nuanced and dynamic understanding of changing entanglements and potential connections.The main aims of my project are a) to conceptualize reportage/chronicle as a genre that facilitates transperipheral communication between two different communities and thus establishes a new literary community, and b) to elaborate a link between the genre-typological and the aesthetic-methodological approach and to redefine the literary and ethical validity of this literature in and beyond the political and social context of the Cold War.Based on the texts of the two authors, I would like to elaborate the hitherto unexplored aesthetic and intellectual structures and networks of literary relations and shed new light on the interwoven history and aesthetics of peripheral literary solidarities in the transnational context of the world polarised by the Cold War. The two authors are seen as mediators who, in the process of translating meaning, allow productive and unpredictable imaginaries to flow across a "silvery bridge" (Kundera 2015, 104), connecting "two edges of the West located at its opposite ends; two neglected, disdained, abandoned lands, two pariah lands" (ibidem). I conceptualize the two edges of the West, Latin America and Eastern Europe, as spaces in which particular historical conditions have shaped the local development of literary journalism.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position