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Naiman Eric, Nabokov, perversely
No full textNaiman Eric, Nabokov, perversely. In: Revue des études slaves, tome 82, fascicule 2, 2011. pp. 359-360
Naiman Eric, Nabokov, perversely
No full textNaiman Eric, Nabokov, perversely. In: Revue des études slaves, tome 82, fascicule 2, 2011. pp. 359-360
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Automation and Form: Soviet Literature Out of Work, 1917-1936
No full textThis dissertation examines a profoundly ambivalent reconceptualization of the “author as producer” in early Soviet literature and culture. Amid the attempts to align writerly work with other forms of production, the literary form became a venue for negotiating the economic issues of labor and value. My main subjects are Mikhail Zoshchenko, Viktor Shklovsky, and Andrey Platonov, three modernist prose writers with extensive records of non-literary labor who channel lower-class vernaculars in their works. My account seeks to investigate the formal affordances of short prose and idiosyncratic storytelling in dealing with the themes of labor and unemployment. The primary focus of my inquiry falls not on early Soviet literature’s depictions of labor, but on its striving to envision itself as a form of work. I thus situate texts from a variety of genres (short stories, personal documents, literary scholarship, creative writing manuals, autofiction, poetry) within the political economy of writerly work around the time of the New Economic Policy (1921-1928).Understood by certain of its practitioners as a subset of technology, early Soviet literature could not be spared from the drive towards modernization. Accordingly, the issue of mechanized labor is essential in these works. In my analysis, Zoshchenko, Platonov, and Shklovsky emerge as precursors for current debates on automation in critical theory. Tracing the striking recurrence of labor-substituting technologies in my corpus, I contend that early Soviet writers came to understand writing as another job at risk. Taking their vision of storytelling as labor seriously, I critically revise the Formalist narrative category of skaz—a means of embodying lower-class subjects in narrative discourse—as a sui generis labor technique. I understand skaz as primarily representing the proletariat not at work, thus becoming the voice of the unemployed and of unemployment as such. As early Soviet literature is haunted by the spectre of being found redundant, in my account, in lieu of the Formalist device of estrangement (ostranenie), the notion of ustranenie (elimination, work force reduction) emerges at the nexus of social, political, and literary forms.Through a series of close readings, I examine the preoccupation of Zoshchenko, Platonov, and Shklovsky with the subjectivity of the writer as a precarious worker in Soviet literary culture of the 1920s and early 1930s. In the “economic imaginary” of the texts under consideration, the narrators, characters, and often their authors routinely find themselves in dire straits and out of work. Consequently, in search of productive models for their writerly activity, Zoshchenko, Platonov, and Shklovsky turn to diverse forms of contingent employment, service work, and housework
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Writing Living People: The Promise and Inadequacy of Mimetic Characterization in Late Soviet Literature
Full text linkThis dissertation traces the charged dynamic of mimetic characterization in late Soviet literature though a study of the works of Yuri Trifonov, Andrei Bitov, and Vasilii Belov. Emerging from the Stalinist era and its socialist realist doctrine of the “positive hero,” Soviet writers faced the daunting opportunity of returning a human face to literary characters. This study argues that writers in the era of “developed socialism” were drawn towards this prospect of writing “living people” into their works, only to be stymied by the incompatibility and obsolescence of mimetic modes of characterization inherited from the Russian literary tradition to individuals shaped by both the horrors of the recent past and a nonheroic present. This ultimate failure of mimetic characterization led writers to reference the late Soviet individual through novel means: unable to adequately represent verisimilar characters in words, the authors explored in this dissertation wove the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas surrounding this impossibility into the structure of their texts themselves.The dissertation’s three chapters examine the specific ways each author responded to this mimetic challenge through close readings of the narrative structure and character systems of texts like Trifonov’s Dom na naberezhnoi [House on the Embankment], Bitov’s Pushkinskii dom [Pushkin House], and Belov’s Privychnoe delo [A Typical Matter]. These readings are informed by the theoretical writings of both Western and Soviet literary scholars such as Lidiia Ginzburg, Gyorgy Lukács, James Phelan, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Despite the diversity of their literary styles, all three authors participated in official literary culture, and as such particular attention is given throughout this dissertation to the reception of these writer’s characters by the Soviet critical apparatus. Late Soviet writers not only had to navigate the newly opened landscape of a “socialist realism without shores” but also engaged with the legacies of 19th century Russian realism, whose model of character greatly informed understandings of mimetic characterization for a revived Russian literary culture. The limitations of this model encountered by late Soviet writers and the innovations these encounters produced have implications far beyond the field of literary history. Recent decades have seen a widespread critical reevaluation of the field of “Soviet subjectivity,” with a particular focus on the Stalinist era. A flood of new information, in particular pertaining to the routine or “everyday life” was made available after the fall of the Soviet Union, which saw the opening of historical archives and a flood of non-fiction documents, diaries and memoirs. Valuable insights can be made from a study of accounts both narrated by and about fictional persons, and this study of characterization in the late Soviet era aims to recover notions of selfhood among the writers, critics, and readers of late Soviet literature
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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"Beautiful Colored, Musical Things": Metaphors and Strategies for Interartistic Exchange in Early European Modernism
Full text linkThis dissertation investigates the aesthetic, cultural, and scientific context that allowed for the flourishing exchanges among the arts at the European fin de siècle. In contrast to standard impressionistic accounts of the Inter-Arts, it foregrounds and examines the time's immensely popular synaesthetic metaphor, while culturally and formally analyzing interartistic works. This work surveys the diverse and heterogeneous discourses that engage with synaesthesia: the figurative mixing or conflation of sense-impressions, for instance, in the perception of sound as color. It shows that the synaesthetic metaphor, usually treated as a trite Modernist mannerism, not only epitomized the synthetic aspirations of the Modernist arts, but also invigorated the exchanges among the arts at the fin de siècle by bridging aesthetic, scientific, and ethical discourses. As a nexus of controversial and fascinating cultural debates, synaesthesia acquired an intricate depth and complex resonance, which this dissertation examines by identifying synaesthetically informed fin-de-siècle cultural and scientific concepts (such as electricity and the phonograph) and using them as interpretative tools to analyze three specific interartistic sites of literary, artistic, and musical modernism. Chapter One shows how Oscar Wilde's Salomé overcomes its own language by turning to the senses, generates new extra-verbal life, both sensory and interartistic, and is transposed across the senses and the arts in Aubrey Beardsley's drawings and Richard Strauss's opera. In the second chapter, this work examines Aleksandr Skriabin's synaesthetic symphony "Prometheus" and the Russian Symbolist poetics of mystical and electric light. The final chapter discusses the phenomenological synaesthetics of Rainer Maria Rilke's middle-period thing poems (Dinggedichte) and their involvement with the visual arts, by focusing on Rilke's fascination with Rodin. It then studies the development of Rilke's synaesthetic theory in his late "Sonnets to Orpheus." Figured as a synaesthetic and phono-graphic translation, Rilke's poetic act seeks both a primordial and a technologically motivated wholeness of sensory experience. Additionally, this work offers an online companion to the dissertation that makes all the musical examples playable: an important feature of the dissertation is its combining of musicological and literary analysis, as well as visual analysis. "Beautiful Colored, Musical Things" proposes a new way of conceptualizing early interartistic Modernism, by suggesting that the synaesthetic metaphor defines and motivates the interartistic exchanges at the fin de siècle. In its critical and methodological goals, this dissertation seeks to foster interdisciplinary exchange, and to overcome the limitations of discipline-bound criticism
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The Struggle with Nature: Socialist Realism in the Soviet Countryside
No full textThis dissertation examines literary explorations of collectivization by three Soviet writers (Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Sholokhov and Fedor Panferov) through an ecocritical lens. Russian and Soviet literature forms a conspicuous lacuna in ecocritical scholarship; the Soviet collectivization novel is equally a lacuna in accounts of the history of Russian and Soviet environmental thinking. Existing scholarship on Socialist Realism tends to consider the novels set on collective farms as largely interchangeable parts of a coherent canon of formulaic production novels (proizvodsvennye romany), and does not differentiate between Soviet novels according to the setting (city, village, new settlement) or the type of industry (heavy, extractive, agricultural) they depict. This dissertation considers collectivization novels as a distinct type within the larger canon of Socialist Realist novels; it asks what the tendency to collapse factory and agricultural novels may have concealed about Socialist Realism and Stalinist culture, particularly regarding the relationship between man and non-human nature. This dissertation explores how Soviet writers in the countryside attempt to reconcile Soviet triumphalism and its central trope – the “struggle with nature” – with agricultural labor and rural life. On the collective farm, the natural environment presents an impediment to socialist progress, a source of wealth to be extracted, a site of redemption for the peasantry that has historically been defined by its ties to the land, and, ultimately, a site of inquiry into the tension between materiality and utopia. This dissertation seeks to offer new interpretations of Soviet novels through ecocritical analysis, and to explore how Soviet literature might expand and enrich ecocritical approaches.This dissertation should be of interest to scholars of Russian literature, Socialist Realism, ecocriticism, Soviet cultural history, and environmental history
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