Tirana Modern

Biblio-Ethnography on the Margins of Europe

Matthew Rosen

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780826504838
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Writing the Relationship between Books and People
• 1. One Hundred Years of Transformation
• 2. Miracles of the Street
• 3. In the Public Interest
• 4. Reading Nearby
• 5. Between Conflicting Systems
• 6. Conclusion. A Good Time to Read
• Appendix. Pika pa sipërfaqe’s Catalogue of Publications, November 2009–November 2021
• Notes
• References
• Index