Description
Book SynopsisThis book aims to examine the heritage of Victor Shklovsky in a variety of disciplines. To achieve this end, we drew upon colleagues from eight different countries across the world USA, Canada, Russia, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Hong Kong in order to bring the widest variety of points of view on the subject. But we also wanted this book to be more than just another collection of essays of literary criticism: we invited scholars from different disciplines literature, cinematography, and philosophy who have dealt with Shklovsky's heritage and saw its practical application in their fields. Therefore, all these essays are written in a variety of humanist academic and scholarly styles, all engaging and dynamic.
Trade ReviewEngaging, uneven, and seminal - very much reflecting the spirit of Shklovsky's own work - , this wide-ranging collection revisits some of his key ideas and tests their relevance today. -- Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London
Of all the Petrograd Formalists, Viktor Shklovsky wrote the most brashly, loved the most lyrically, coped most pragmatically with the horrors of his era, and lived the longest. As critic, creative writer and closet lay philosopher, Shklovsky was—as one contributor to this volume puts it—always a public figure in history but careful “to avoid being one with it.” It took hard work to survive. To make a living, Shklovsky edited banned film scripts to get them past the censor and ghostwrote books for less gifted colleagues. As he confessed to his Italian interviewer Serena Vitale near the end of his life, there were only two things he never wrote: poetry, and denunciations. This wide-ranging volume celebrates Shklovsky’s legacy in thing theory, feminist formalism, defamiliarization in film, the limits of the translatable, and provides newly-sensitized readings of world literature from Cervantes through Tolstoy, Lewis Carroll, Pynchon and Borges. A fine tribute to Soviet Russia’s most cosmopolitan monolingual critic. -- Caryl Emerson, Princeton University
Table of ContentsIntroduction Irina Evdokimova Part I: Shklovsky’s Heritage in Literature Chapter 1: Thinking in Images, Differently: Shklovsky, Yakubinsky, and the Power of Evidence Michael Eskin Chapter 2: The Odyssey of Viktor Shklovsky: Life after Formalism Basil Lvoff Chapter 3: The Eternal Wonderer, or Who was Viktor Shklovsky? Slav N. Gratchev Chapter 4: Defamiliarization in translating Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. Victor Fet and Michael Everson Chapter 5: Viktor Shklovsky on Narrative David Gorman Chapter 6: Defamiliarization and Genre: Semiotic Subversions in The Crying of Lot 49 and “Death and the Compass.” Melissa Garr Chapter 7: Shklovsky and Things, or Why Tolstoy’s Sofa should matter. Sergei Oushakine Chapter 8: The Motherland will Notice her Terrible Mistake:* Paradox of Futurism in Jasienski, Mayakovsky and Shklovsky Norbert Francis Chapter 9: Framing and Threading Non-Literary Discourse into the Structure of Cervantes´s Don Quixote II Rachel Schmidt Chapter 10: Shklovsky and World Literature. Grant Hamilton Chapter 11: Racism and Robots: Defamiliarizing Social Justice in Rosa Montero’s Tears in the Rain and the 21st Century. Steven Mills Part II: Shklovsky’s Heritage in Arts Chapter 12: Shklovsky’s Dog and Mulvey’s Pleasure: The Secret Life of Defamiliarization. Eric Naiman Chapter 13: Reading Viktor Shklovsky’s “Arts as Technique” in the Context of Early Cinema. Annie Van den Oever Part III: Shklovsky’s Heritage in Philosophy Chapter 14: Philosophical work of Russian formalism Alexander Markov Chapter 15: Shklovsky as a Technique: Literary Theory and the Biographical Strategies of a Soviet Intellectual Ilya Kalinin Chapter 16: From a New Seeing to a New Acting: Viktor Shklovsky's Ostranenie and Analyses of Games and Play. Holger Pötzsch
