Srikanth Reddy
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199791026
- eISBN:
- 9780199950287
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199791026.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, American, 20th Century Literature
In The Fatalist, Lyn Hejinian declares herself the heir apparent to Diderot’s unruly Jacques, employing digression as a literary method for dismantling Enlightenment narratologies of rational order ...
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In The Fatalist, Lyn Hejinian declares herself the heir apparent to Diderot’s unruly Jacques, employing digression as a literary method for dismantling Enlightenment narratologies of rational order and linear progression. The digressive sequences in Hejinian’s work unsettle the fundamental narratological coordinates of beginnings, middles, and ends upon which literary form itself is predicated. Drawing on the theories of the Russian Formalists during her multiple expeditions to the Soviet Union, Hejinian mobilizes narratological practice as a method for deconstructing the fatalistic master-narratives of the Cold War era. This poet’s literary engagement with the Russian novel provides a forum for examining the ways in which plot—or sjuzet, in Shklovsky’s formulation—constructs a digressive account of events which may in turn be fractured and defamiliarized within the medium of the lyric. Ultimately abandoning the novelistic paradigm in favor of the inconclusive narration of the chronicle form, moreover, Hejinian discovers in the rejection of closure a method for opening up multiple logics within a unified literary text.Less
In The Fatalist, Lyn Hejinian declares herself the heir apparent to Diderot’s unruly Jacques, employing digression as a literary method for dismantling Enlightenment narratologies of rational order and linear progression. The digressive sequences in Hejinian’s work unsettle the fundamental narratological coordinates of beginnings, middles, and ends upon which literary form itself is predicated. Drawing on the theories of the Russian Formalists during her multiple expeditions to the Soviet Union, Hejinian mobilizes narratological practice as a method for deconstructing the fatalistic master-narratives of the Cold War era. This poet’s literary engagement with the Russian novel provides a forum for examining the ways in which plot—or sjuzet, in Shklovsky’s formulation—constructs a digressive account of events which may in turn be fractured and defamiliarized within the medium of the lyric. Ultimately abandoning the novelistic paradigm in favor of the inconclusive narration of the chronicle form, moreover, Hejinian discovers in the rejection of closure a method for opening up multiple logics within a unified literary text.
Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823264858
- eISBN:
- 9780823266852
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823264858.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Jason Harding
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- November 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198821441
- eISBN:
- 9780191883170
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198821441.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter employs concepts and terms drawn from Russian Formalism to assist reading key moments of non-translation in The Waste Land. Treated as avant-garde linguistic ‘shifts’ that disrupt and ...
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This chapter employs concepts and terms drawn from Russian Formalism to assist reading key moments of non-translation in The Waste Land. Treated as avant-garde linguistic ‘shifts’ that disrupt and estrange the poetic form, particular instances of non-translation in the poem—from the epigraph to the wild cacophony of different languages at the end of the poem—are seen as covert and coded expressions of powerful affect. This chapter considers these experimental disruptions of form in the social and political contexts of post-war avant-garde revolt and recognition of individual and collective trauma.Less
This chapter employs concepts and terms drawn from Russian Formalism to assist reading key moments of non-translation in The Waste Land. Treated as avant-garde linguistic ‘shifts’ that disrupt and estrange the poetic form, particular instances of non-translation in the poem—from the epigraph to the wild cacophony of different languages at the end of the poem—are seen as covert and coded expressions of powerful affect. This chapter considers these experimental disruptions of form in the social and political contexts of post-war avant-garde revolt and recognition of individual and collective trauma.
Ana Hedberg Olenina
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190051259
- eISBN:
- 9780190051297
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190051259.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Chapter 2 explores scholarly theories that accounted for the role of kinesthetic sensations of pronunciation in the aesthetic experience of the poetic form. The Russian Formalists described the ...
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Chapter 2 explores scholarly theories that accounted for the role of kinesthetic sensations of pronunciation in the aesthetic experience of the poetic form. The Russian Formalists described the articulatory properties of various poetic styles as an objective, impersonal formal structure. They aimed to establish whether this structure takes shape during the process of verse composition and whether it impacts the subsequent oral renditions of the poem by the author and other readers. In historicizing the Formalists’ conceptions of the performative, embodied aspect of poetry, my analysis centers on the Petrograd Institute of the Living Word (Institut Zhivogo Slova) and the Laboratory for the Study of Artistic Speech under the auspices of the Institute of Art History (Kabinet Izucheniiа Khudizhestvennoi Rechi pri Institute Istorii Iskusstv) between 1919 and 1930. Their endeavor to register poetic rhythms and intonations closely resembled the methods of experimental phonetics used by the European and American phoneticians. My analysis points to numerous common sources shared by the Russian and Western authors—notably, the publications coming out from Jean-Pierre Rousselot’s laboratory of experimental phonetics. The final section of the chapter unravels the concept of “formal emotions,” proposed by the Russian Formalists, as they attempted to distance themselves from the simplistic biographic interpretations of affects encoded in literature and considered the psychomotor properties of verse from the standpoint of genre and style.Less
Chapter 2 explores scholarly theories that accounted for the role of kinesthetic sensations of pronunciation in the aesthetic experience of the poetic form. The Russian Formalists described the articulatory properties of various poetic styles as an objective, impersonal formal structure. They aimed to establish whether this structure takes shape during the process of verse composition and whether it impacts the subsequent oral renditions of the poem by the author and other readers. In historicizing the Formalists’ conceptions of the performative, embodied aspect of poetry, my analysis centers on the Petrograd Institute of the Living Word (Institut Zhivogo Slova) and the Laboratory for the Study of Artistic Speech under the auspices of the Institute of Art History (Kabinet Izucheniiа Khudizhestvennoi Rechi pri Institute Istorii Iskusstv) between 1919 and 1930. Their endeavor to register poetic rhythms and intonations closely resembled the methods of experimental phonetics used by the European and American phoneticians. My analysis points to numerous common sources shared by the Russian and Western authors—notably, the publications coming out from Jean-Pierre Rousselot’s laboratory of experimental phonetics. The final section of the chapter unravels the concept of “formal emotions,” proposed by the Russian Formalists, as they attempted to distance themselves from the simplistic biographic interpretations of affects encoded in literature and considered the psychomotor properties of verse from the standpoint of genre and style.
Ana Hedberg Olenina
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190051259
- eISBN:
- 9780190051297
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190051259.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
