Estrangement Revisited II (Poetics Today, Spring 2006)

Poetics Today brings together scholars from throughout the world who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to the study of literature (e.g., semiotics and narratology) and with applying such approaches to the interpretation of literary works. Poetics Today presents a remarkable diversity of methodologies and examines a wide range of literary and critical topics. Several thematic review sections or special issues are published in each volume, and each issue contains a book review section, with article-length review essays.

Volume 27, Number 1, Spring 2006 : Estrangement Revisited II

CONTENTS :

Tatiana Smoliarova, "Distortion and Theatricality: Estrangement in Diderot and Shklovsky"

Abstract : The article investigates some textual coincidences between Denis Diderot's major works on art and theater and the Formalist manifesto "Art as Device" by Victor Shklovsky. Acknowledging the accidental nature of these coincidences, I try to determine the common philosophical origins of the metaphors that aesthetics "lived by" in mid-eighteenth-century France and in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. What kind of cultural crisis engenders the cult of difficulty and retardation? How is this aesthetics connected to the idea of freedom? In order to answer these questions, we trace the key notion of Shklovsky's theory, the automatization of perception, back to its "personified version"—l'homme-automate of Diderot. The modernity of both these authors consists in their special concern with the deliberate distancing of artistic representation from the reality represented. Studying the phenomenon of the delinearization of human perception from the semiotic viewpoint, the article discusses visual counterparts of literary estrangement, such as anamorphic structures in painting and the art of pantomime in the theater.

Cristina Vatulescu, "The Politics of Estrangement: Tracking Shklovsky's Device through Literary and Policing Practices"

Abstract : Critics have frequently accused Russian Formalism of supporting an apolitical separation of art from life. As a central Formalist term, estrangement (ostranenie) often bore the brunt of this accusation. Taking issue with this critique, this essay focuses on the entangled relationship between the aesthetics and politics of estrangement and argues that an attentive look at the history of estrangement reveals its deep involvement with revolutionary and police state politics. This essay traces estrangement's conflicted development through Victor Shklovsky's oeuvre and beyond, in the work of Nicolae Steinhardt and Joseph Brodsky, and also in secret police interrogation and reeducation practices and in CIA manuals. In Sentimental Journey, Shklovsky wrote that during the civil war, life itself was made strange and became art. Shklovsky's memoirs shed light on the effects of this revolutionary estrangement on the self. Furthermore, the memoirs reenacted this unsettling estrangement by incorporating elements of official Soviet genres, such as the trial deposition, the interrogation autobiography, and the letter to the government. As Shklovsky suggests, the effects of revolutionary estrangement on the self were certainly not limited to the therapeutic value of refreshing perception that is commonly ascribed to artistic estrangement. Indeed, estrangement of the self was a key device in secret police interrogation and reeducation practices; as such, it was instrumental in the politicized fashioning of the subject during Soviet times. In their confrontations with this police state brand of estrangement, writers like Joseph Brodsky and Nicolae Steinhardt further probed its methods and then appropriated its lessons for their own ends, developing self-estrangement as a new art of survival.

Anna Wexler Katsnelson, "My Leader, Myself? Pictorial Estrangement and Aesopian Language in the Late Work of Kazimir Malevich"

Abstract : In the late 1920s, the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich embarked on a new direction in art that eighty years later continues to perplex the art historical establishment: the artist formerly known for the radical abstraction of The Black Square returned to figuration. My analysis attempts to unpack this about-face and address the many questions that surround it. How does Malevich's late work relate to the regime of Socialist Realism? Was his return to figuration a conversion, an aesthetic rethinking, or a calculated move? I argue that this return was designed to navigate the restrictions of the new aesthetic episteme and carve out a third way, ostensibly compliant but in fact containing kernels of subversiveness. This third way, I suggest, consisted of a peculiar painterly poetics of estrangement and Aesopian language. While scholarship has offered insights into the literary aspect of these phenomena, very little has been written on their pictorial incarnation. Focusing on Malevich's late paintings of Russian peasants and his 1933 Self-Portrait, I try to trace the complex art historical moment of the late 1920s and early 1930s and map out the representational possibilities of the two literary concepts.

Jacob Edmond, "Lyn Hejinian and Russian Estrangement"

Abstract : This essay shows how the Language poet Lyn Hejinian came to relate her experiences of Russia and her poetics of the "person" to Victor Shklovsky's concept of estrangement (ostranenie). I argue that in The Guard (1984), Oxota (1991), Leningrad (1991), and in other writings about Russia, Hejinian came to conflate poetic estrangement with the estranging effect of Russia itself and, in so doing, developed her poetics of the person, which linked the material text of poetic estrangement with the social poetics of everyday life. Everyday life in Russia seemed to take on the very qualities that she associated with estrangement: the dissolution of defined objects and essential selfhood and their replacement with the dynamic experience that Hejinian defined as "personhood." At the same time, Hejinian found in this dynamic personhood a means to oppose essentialist national identities, so that Russian estrangement also became central to her utopian vision of bridging the Cold War divide between Russia and the United States.

Meir Sternberg, "Telling in Time (III): Chronology, Estrangement, and Stories of Literary History "

Abstract : Trumpeted as the artistic hallmark, central to Russian Formalism, and persistent ever since, estrangement yet remains an ill-defined term. We have nothing like a comprehensive approach to it, equipped to specify its workings by kind, medium, art form, discourse level, historical context. Narrative, Shklovsky's own forte, would appear the paradigm case, as the most inclusive genre and the most akin to art's and life's temporal movement. I accordingly revisit "making strange," with its branches and afterlives, from the viewpoint of narrative theory and history—especially in relation to my account of narrative dynamics, in this "Telling in Time" series and elsewhere. Above all, given Shklovsky's perceptual emphasis, does his master effect constitute the genre's universal, overlapping and/or rivaling the dynamics of prospection ("suspense"), retrospection ("curiosity"), and, especially, recognition ("surprise")? Or is it only a pretender to the title, a fortiori to literature's and art's supreme value and motive power? The answer hinges on the equation, current since Formalism, of perceptual estrangement with temporal disarrangement: artistic sjuzhet is disordered, hence defamiliarized, fabula, à la Tristram Shandy. Itself a variant of the anti-chronologism that has always dominated narrative study—as early as in medias res—this formula proves untenable in all its versions and reversions. But the inquiry into it, and them, is nonetheless instructive. The versions consist in two silent Formalist logics of making strange: one absolute and universalist, the other more relativized to history, both originating in Shklovsky's own ambivalence, or thoughtlessness, and still going strong. The reversions include the underground pushing of the idea to some extremein (Post)Structuralist narratology—Genette's anti-perceptual, mind-less formalism, Barthes's drive against all sequentiality (actional, textual, historical) in the name of "writerly" license—as well as open follow-ups, in cognitivist and literary-empirical circles, for example. Through these lineages, inter alia, the argument develops a set of key issues and counterproposals. Thus the shifts of estrangement, as a value, between top and low priority; its affective, or experiential, constants and variables; its relation to narrativity, their respective limits included; its correlation of narrative's unmatched time repertoire with the temporalities of history, via survival tactics and more strategic dishabituating resources; the models that capture, or emplot, its birth-death-revival (hi)stories; its transfer from the life of art to the art of living; and, most fundamental, its endless form/function interplay in both synchrony and diachrony, under the Proteus Principle.

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