Courtauld Institute of Art

This Reader emerged out of a pedagogical experiment: a German-affiliated Hungarian-born scholar and a Polish-speaking English-born scholar designing an English-language MA course on Central-European art and culture for an international group of students.[1] As we considered how best to teach modernism from a Central-European perspective at the Courtauld, and discussed the methodological and narrative shifts our task would entail, we were inspired by Deleuze and Guattari's 1975 essay 'Kafka.

Toward a Minor Literature' . The philosophers were interested in Franz Kafka's lived experience of multiple cultural identification, as a German-speaking Jew from Austro-Hungarian Prague, and defined the particularly Central-European features of his writing as having the hallmarks of 'a minor literature'.

They argued that such literatures have a 'high coefficient of deterritorialisation', that 'everything in them is political' and 'takes on a collective value', ultimately proposing that minor modernisms embodied the 'revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature'.[2] We were also seeking to define how the modernisms of East-Central Europe were at the revolutionary heart of the modernist enterprise as a whole.

If, for Kafka, it was the 'situation of the German language, in Czechoslovakia, as a fluid language intermixed with Czech and Yiddish' that produced the 'possibility of invention', then, for the artists that interested us, likewise, it was the fluid interpretation of the modernist idiom and its intermixing with local twists that gave rise to the particular power of their creativity.[3] Our course required students to rethink European modernism as an interdependent whole, from the starting point that it could not be understood properly without an understanding of the art of East-Central Europe.