A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism

A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism PDF Author: Evgeny Dobrenko
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822977443
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
This edited volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas—political, intellectual, and institutional—the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse. The chapters follow early movements such as formalism, the Bakhtin Circle, Proletklut, futurism, the fellow-travelers, and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. By the cultural revolution of 1928, literary criticism became a mechanism of Soviet policies, synchronous with official ideology. The chapters follow theory and criticism into the 1930s with examinations of the Union of Soviet Writers, semantic paleontology, and socialist realism under Stalin. A more "humanized" literary criticism appeared during the ravaging years of World War II, only to be supplanted by a return to the party line, Soviet heroism, and anti-Semitism in the late Stalinist period. During Khrushchev's Thaw, there was a remarkable rise in liberal literature and criticism, that was later refuted in the nationalist movement of the "long" 1970s. The same decade saw, on the other hand, the rise to prominence of semiotics and structuralism. Postmodernism and a strong revival of academic literary studies have shared the stage since the start of the post-Soviet era. For the first time anywhere, this collection analyzes all of the important theorists and major critical movements during a tumultuous ideological period in Russian history, including developments in emigre literary theory and criticism.

A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism

A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism PDF Author: Evgeny Dobrenko
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822977443
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Get Book Here

Book Description
This edited volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas—political, intellectual, and institutional—the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse. The chapters follow early movements such as formalism, the Bakhtin Circle, Proletklut, futurism, the fellow-travelers, and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. By the cultural revolution of 1928, literary criticism became a mechanism of Soviet policies, synchronous with official ideology. The chapters follow theory and criticism into the 1930s with examinations of the Union of Soviet Writers, semantic paleontology, and socialist realism under Stalin. A more "humanized" literary criticism appeared during the ravaging years of World War II, only to be supplanted by a return to the party line, Soviet heroism, and anti-Semitism in the late Stalinist period. During Khrushchev's Thaw, there was a remarkable rise in liberal literature and criticism, that was later refuted in the nationalist movement of the "long" 1970s. The same decade saw, on the other hand, the rise to prominence of semiotics and structuralism. Postmodernism and a strong revival of academic literary studies have shared the stage since the start of the post-Soviet era. For the first time anywhere, this collection analyzes all of the important theorists and major critical movements during a tumultuous ideological period in Russian history, including developments in emigre literary theory and criticism.

Russian Formalist Criticism

Russian Formalist Criticism PDF Author: Lee T. Lemon
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803254602
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
"Some of the most important literary theory of this century."--College English Russian formalists emerged from the Russian Revolution with ideas about the independence of literature. They enjoyed that independence until Stalin shut them down. By then they had produced essays that remain among the best defenses ever written for both literature and its theory. Included here are four essays representing key points in the formalists' short history. Victor Scklovsky's pathbreaking "Art as Technique" (1917) vindicates disorder in literary style. His 1921 essay on Tristram Shandy makes that eccentric novel the centerpiece for a theory of narrative. A section from Tomashevsky's "Thematics" (1925) inventories the elements of stories. In "The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" (1927) Boris Eichenbaum defends Russian formalism from many attacks. An able champion, he describes formalism's evolution, notes its major workers and works, clears away decayed axioms, and rescues literature from "primitive historicism" and other dangers. These essays set a course for literary studies that led to Prague structuralism, French semiotics, and postmodern poetics. Russian Formalist Criticism has been honored as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year by the American Library Association.

Russian Formalism

Russian Formalism PDF Author: Peter Steiner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501707019
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Russian Formalism, one of the twentieth century's most important movements in literary criticism, has received far less attention than most of its rivals. Examining Formalism in light of more recent developments in literary theory, Peter Steiner here offers the most comprehensive critique of Formalism to date. Steiner studies the work of the Formalists in terms of the major tropes that characterized their thought. He first considers those theorists who viewed a literary work as a mechanism, an organism, or a system. He then turns to those who sought to reduce literature to its most basic element—language—and who consequently replaced poetics with linguistics. Throughout, Steiner elucidates the basic principles of the Formalists and explores their contributions to the study of poetics, literary history, the theory of literary genre, and prosody. Russian Formalism is an authoritative introduction to the movement that was a major precursor of contemporary critical thought.

The Origins of Russian Literary Theory

The Origins of Russian Literary Theory PDF Author: Jessica Merrill
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810144921
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
Russian Formalism is widely considered the foundation of modern literary theory. This book reevaluates the movement in light of the current commitment to rethink the concept of literary form in cultural-historical terms. Jessica Merrill provides a novel reconstruction of the intellectual historical context that enabled the emergence of Formalism in the 1910s. Formalists adopted a mode of thought Merrill calls the philological paradigm, a framework for thinking about language, literature, and folklore that lumped them together as verbal tradition. For those who thought in these terms, verbal tradition was understood to be inseparable from cultural history. Merrill situates early literary theories within this paradigm to reveal abandoned paths in the history of the discipline—ideas that were discounted by the structuralist and post-structuralist accounts that would emerge after World War II. The Origins of Russian Literary Theory reconstructs lost Formalist theories of authorship, of the psychology of narrative structure, and of the social spread of poetic innovations. According to these theories, literary form is always a product of human psychology and cultural history. By recontextualizing Russian Formalism within this philological paradigm, the book highlights the aspects of Formalism’s legacy that speak to the priorities of twenty-first-century literary studies.

Russian Literary Criticism

Russian Literary Criticism PDF Author: R. H. Stacy
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815601081
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Russian Literary Criticism is a survey of the various ways in which representative Russian critics from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century, have viewed not only the literary works of other Russian and non-Russian writers but also the problems of literature in general. Primarily intended for readers who do not know Russian, this book discusses the major Russian critics and critical movements. The author provides sufficient historical and political background to enable the reader to understand both the literary situation and the problems facing Russian critics at any given time – whether the influx of various ideologies, official Soviet views, or dissident opinion form the Decembrists to Solzhenitsyn.

Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value

Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value PDF Author: Jurij Striedter
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674536531
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description


The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 7, Modernism and the New Criticism

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 7, Modernism and the New Criticism PDF Author: George Alexander Kennedy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521300124
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Book Description
The history of the most hotly debated areas of literary theory, including structuralism and deconstruction.

Only Among Women

Only Among Women PDF Author: Anne Eakin Moss
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810141043
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Only Among Women reveals how the idea of a community of women as a social sphere ostensibly free from the taint of money, sex, or self-interest originated in the classic Russian novel, fueled mystical notions of unity in turn-of-the-century modernism, and finally assumed a privileged place in Stalinist culture, especially cinema.

Flight from Eden

Flight from Eden PDF Author: Steven Cassedy
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520371844
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Steven Cassedy takes aim at two of the most enduring myths of modern criticism: that it is secular, and that it is new and autonomous. He argues that though modern criticism is often forbiddingly scientific and technical, the modern critic remains something of a mystic. Every school of modern criticism—from structuralism to postmodern criticism—rests on a faith in an "Eden," an irreducible essence, a myth, like the common myth that there is an intrinsic distinction between "poetic" language and "ordinary" language. The modern critic attempts to abandon all mystical faith; this is the "flight from Eden." But it is always in vain. It is traditionally assumed that modern literary criticism and theory came from France, and relatively recently. In fact, according to Cassedy, the entire modern critical consciousness was already formed by the early twentieth century in the minds of writers who were primarily neither professional critics nor philosophers, but poets. Some were French (Mallarmé, and Valéry); others were not (Rilke, Bely, and the Russian avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov). In them we find the same Edenic faith, the same effort to abandon it, and the same failure of that effort. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

A History of Russian Literature

A History of Russian Literature PDF Author: Victor Terras
Publisher: New Haven : Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300049718
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 654

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Book Description
Surveys Russian literature from the eleventh century to the present, set within the context of political, social, religious, and philisophical developments