ABOUT THIS BOOK

Guided by the thesis that literature can transform social reality, Tirana Modern draws on ethnographic and historical material to examine the public culture of reading in modern Albania. As its starting point, this book asks: How has Albanian literature and literary translation shaped social action during the longue durée of Albanian modernity?

Drawing on material collected through fieldwork with a community of readers, writers, and translators attached to the independent Albanian publisher Pika pa sipërfaqe (Point without Surface), Tirana Modern provides a tightly focused ethnography of literary culture in Albania that brings into relief the more general dialectic between social imagination and social reality as mediated by reading and literature.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Matthew Rosen is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ohio University.

REVIEWS

"This is a story of desires, aspirations, and visions, as well as the precarity and violence of post-socialist late-capitalism, located in the seemingly profane choice—what to translate and publish next, and why. As such, it is a compelling ethnography of how ideas move about through literary and social cross-referencing, actions taken, and meanings attributed to physical and imagined social, political, and economic locations, spaces, and practices."
—Nita Luci, author of The Politics of Remembrance and Belonging: Life Histories of Albanian Women in Kosova— -

"This book is a pioneering contribution to literary ethnography, literary history, and the role of literature in contemporary Albania."
—Nataša Gregorič Bon, Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts— -

"This is a story of desires, aspirations, and visions, as well as the precarity and violence of post-socialist late-capitalism, located in the seemingly profane choice—what to translate and publish next, and why. As such, it is a compelling ethnography of how ideas move about through literary and social cross-referencing, actions taken, and meanings attributed to physical and imagined social, political, and economic locations, spaces, and practices."
—Nita Luci, author of The Politics of Remembrance and Belonging: Life Histories of Albanian Women in Kosova— -

"This book is a pioneering contribution to literary ethnography, literary history, and the role of literature in contemporary Albania."
—Nataša Gregorič Bon, Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts— -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Writing the Relationship between Books and People
Chapter 1: One Hundred Years of Transformation
Chapter 2: Miracles of the Street
Chapter 3: In the Public Interest
Chapter 4: Reading Nearby
Chapter 5: Between Conflicting Systems
Conclusion: A Good Time to Read
Appendix. Pika pa sipërfaqe's Catalogue of Publications, November 2009–November 2021
Notes
References
Index