Гетеротопии национального поля литературы: теоретические проблемы исследования «других литератур» Литвы
Heterotopies of National Literary Field: theoretical issues for investigating “other literatures” in Lithuania

Summary/Abstract: Ethnic minority writing studies have more than 20 years of history in the US, Canada, Australia and the EU; however, in the post-Soviet countries like Lithuania it is quite a new and thorny issue. One of the reasons why the questions of multiculturalism and intercultural dialogue are not easily addressed in the post-Soviet space might be the memory of the Soviet politics of mandatory “friendship of nations”. Another reason is the ambiguous situation of minorities (for instance, Russians and Poles in Lithuania), who are historically perceived as colonizers. Having that in mind, the paper discusses three possible ways of constructing ethnic minority literature as an object of investigation in relation to the Lithuanian material. The first perspective addresses the problem of ethnic minority writing in the context of the hosting culture or state. This perspective is introduced through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts of the “minor literature” and “becoming-minor”. The second perspective considers dislocated literature to be a part of the diaspora discourse, which nowadays meets the need to revise the concepts of traditional, postcolonial and post-Soviet diasporas. The third perspective suggests that intercultural literary phenomenon should be addressed in the context of the history of the world literary space, which was first described by Pascale Casanova in her book “The World Republic of Letters”.

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