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This volume draws together an array of distinguished scholars of ancient and modern literatures to consider the ways in which historicism in literary studies can and should be construed and pursued today. In particular, the contributors to the volume seek to challenge and complement the historicism that stresses proximate socio-political contexts as well as the more recent and salutary concern with understanding literary production and reception on a global scale with the perspective of the longue durée of literary forms and institutions. Thus, the approach advanced in these essays would complement the world-geographical with the world-historical perspective on the literary process, and where a more traditional historicism would see unified or, at best, “polyphonic” responses to concrete historical dilemmas, the contributors to this volume uncover deep-historical stratifications and non-synchronicities, in which certain formal solutions may display “elective affinities” with other, chronologically distant solutions to analogous problems. In their quest for a revitalized and more expansive historicism in literary study, the contributors to the volume build on the tradition of Historical Poetics, pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838-1906) and developed in various fruitful directions by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg (among others). The volume also seeks to place this critical tradition in dialogue with such thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Curtius, Hans-Robert Jauss, and Fredric Jameson, who all have approached literature in a globally-comparativist and evolutionary-historical spirit.

The term “poetry” is currently used loosely to describe any piece of writing—usually fairly short—that is lineated. But surely the poetry that is memorable, that we read and reread and cite to ourselves and to others, is not just a result of lineation or an interesting message. The poetic, this book suggests, following Marcel Duchamp who taught us that even the objects made from the very same mold are never “the same,” is best understood as the language of what Duchamp called the infrathin—the seemingly miniscule difference, temporal as well as spatial—between items that make their collocation unique and memorable. In poetry, whether in “verse” or “prose,” words and phrases, seemingly unrelated in ordinary discourse, are realligned by means of sound, visual layout, etymology, grammar, and construction so as to “make it new.” In a revisionist “micropoetics,” this book draws primarily on major modernist poets from Stein and Yeats to Beckett, to Concrete Poetry, and such contemporaries as Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, and Rae Armantrout, suggesting that the usual emphasis on what this or that poem is “about” does not do justice to the poem’s infrathin possibilities. Infrathin challenges our current habits of reading. It attempts to answer the central question: What is it that makes poetry poetry?

In the late 19th century, neurophysiology introduced techniques for detecting somatic signs of psychological processes. Scientific modes of recording, representing, and interpreting body movement as “expressive” soon found use in multiple cultural domains. Based on archival materials, this study charts the avenues by which physiological psychology reached the arts and evaluates institutional practices and political trends that promoted interdisciplinary engagements in the first quarter of the 20th century. In mapping the emergence of a paradigm it calls “psychomotor aesthetics,” this book uncovers little-known sources of Russian Futurism, Formalist poetics, avant-garde film theories of Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein, and early Soviet programs for evaluating filmgoers’ reactions. Drawing attention to the intellectual exchange between Russian authors and their European and American counterparts, the book documents diverse cultural applications of laboratory methods for studying the psyche. Both a history and a critical project, the book attends to the ways in which artists and theorists dealt with the universalist fallacies inherited from biologically oriented psychology—at times, endorsing the positivist, deterministic outlook, and at times, resisting, reinterpreting, and defamiliarizing these scientific notions. In exposing the vastness of cross-disciplinary exchange at the juncture of neurophysiology and the arts at the turn of the 20th century, Psychomotor Aesthetics calls attention to the tremendous cultural resonance of theories foregrounding the somatic substrate of emotional and cognitive experience—theories, which anticipate the promises and limitations of today’s neuroaesthetics and neuromarketing.