Estrangement Revisited (Poetics Today, vol. 26, no. 4, 2005)

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. 

Volume 26, Number 4, Winter 2005

Special Topic : ESTRANGEMENT REVISITED

- Svetlana Boym, " Poetics and Politics of Estrangement: Victor Shklovsky and Hannah Arendt "

Abstract: This essay proposes to place the poetics of Russian Formalismwithin a broader European context of literary, philosophical,and political reflection on modernity. The historical metamorphosisof estrangement from a technique of art to an existential artof survival and a practice of freedom and dissent is tracedhere through Victor Shklovsky's experimental autobiographicaltexts of the 1920s and their critical reception. In this analysis,estrangement is not regarded as an escape from the political;instead, it helps us think anew the relationship between aestheticand political practices in Stalin's time. Shklovsky's writingon estrangement and freedom is read together with Hannah Arendt'sreflections on distance, freedom, and the banality of evil.

- Michael Holquist and Ilya Kliger, " Minding the Gap: Toward a Historical Poetics of Estrangement "

Abstract: Under different names, alienation has been around for a longtime. However, Immanuel Kant's Copernican revolution marks anew and deeper degree of alienation. Kant's definition of thesubject—denied contact with the world as such and forcedconstantly to synthesize the immediacy of intuitions with thelawfulness of concepts—is a hopelessly riven "I-think."Reading Kant was a traumatic event for contemporaries, especiallyfor philosophers, who attempted to make the world whole againby formulating new versions of absolute unity. It was Wilhelmvon Humboldt who theorized a way both to accept the gap in Kantianepistemology and, at least partially—through languageunderstood as inner speech—to overcome the gap. Reactingto later appropriations of von Humboldt, Russian linguists andsuch literary theorists as Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson,Sergej Karcevskij, and Mikhail Bakhtin explored the complexityof alienation in language and offered proposals for negotiatingit in different versions of literariness.

- Caryl Emerson, " Shklovsky's ostranenie, Bakhtin's vnenakhodimost' (How Distance Serves an Aesthetics of Arousal Differently from an Aesthetics Based on Pain) "

Abstract: As literary critics and language theorists, Viktor Shklovskyand Mikhail Bakhtin each utilize "aesthetic distance" in anunconventional way—unrelated, it would seem, to the usualaesthetic criteria of beauty, goodness, or truth. For the FormalistShklovsky, the distancing or estrangement of an object sharpensour perception and stimulates our senses, thereby arousing usto artistic (as opposed to drably everyday) experience. Forthe dialogic Bakhtin, the mandate to "be outside" that whichyou create is a matter of subject-subject relations, not subject-object.This essay considers only one aspect of this intersection: therole of pain (the hurting body as the norm) in these two aestheticeconomies, Shklovsky's and Bakhtin's.

- Galin Tihanov, " The Politics of Estrangement: The Case of the Early Shklovsky "

Abstract:  discuss here Shklovsky's theory of estrangement as formulatedin a number of texts written before the October revolution of1917. The concept of estrangement can only be properly graspedif the early Shklovsky is placed in the context of World WarI; we need to begin to see him as an author shaped by that warand as a participant in the larger constellation of brilliantEuropean essayists who responded to this momentous event. Tothis end, the article draws parallels between his writings andthose of Ernst Jünger and Georg Simmel. More importantly,it uncovers the conservative aspects of Shklovsky's theory ofestrangement and analyzes his contradictory attitudes towarddemocracy and modernization. The final section traces the fortunesof Shklovsky's concept of estrangement at the hands of its mostsignificant critics, Bertolt Brecht and Herbert Marcuse.

- Greta N. Slobin, " Why the First-Wave Russian Literary Diaspora Embraced Shklovskian Estrangement " 

Abstract: This essay explores the implications of Victor Shklovsky's conceptof estrangement as it extends to the experience of Russian writersin exile, following the October revolution. The discussion,informed by diaspora theory, begins with Shklovsky's stay inBerlin in 1922–23, when border crossings were still possible.He argued for literature's independence from politics. The dynamicsof diasporic literary life and its evolving "articulations ofidentity" are considered in the context of Soviet literary politics.The semantic unfolding of estrangement and its "historical metamorphoses"emerge in the work of two émigré writers. AlekseiRemizov relied on estrangement in linguistic and genre experimentsin exile that encompass historical changes in the Russian languageat home and abroad. The poet Vladislav Khodasevich argued forthe creative continuity of Russian literature in exile, citingpast models, from Dante to the Hebrew Poetic Renaissance inthe Russian empire at the turn of the twentieth century.

^- Nancy Ruttenburg,  " Dostoevsky's Estrangement "

Abstract: During the transitional period between the early works of thelate 1840s and production of the "great novels" in the mid-1860s,Dostoevsky confronted the problem of the Russian common peoplewith particular urgency and immediacy. The consolations of thesocial theories which underlay his earlier political activism—andfor which he suffered a decade of Siberian exile, spent partlyin a hard-labor camp— withered in the face of actual,enforced contact with the common class. Upon his return to thecapital on the eve of peasant emancipation in 1861, Dostoevskystaked the resurrection of his authorial career on his insistencethat an abyss divided common and elite cultures which wouldbedevil elite attempts to represent the Russian common peopleas objects of literary and journalistic inquiry. At a momentwhen intellectuals and other urban elites struggled to preparebureaucratically and imaginatively for a liberated peasantry,estrangement became the cornerstone of Dostoevsky's aestheticpractice. Instead of rendering a naturalistic portrait of thecommon people enhanced by the pathos of a firsthand knowledgebought dear, Dostoevsky traces in his fictionalized accountof his prison experience, Notes from the House of the Dead,a peculiar disintegration of the narrating consciousness forwhom estrangement emerges as the condition by which the peasant-othercan be known and the limitations of knowing acknowledged andsuffered. This article explores the genesis in fictionalizedautobiography of the Dostoevskian narrator familiar to readersof thegreat novels, a narrator who dismantles the very structureof knowing and telling, a would-be guide to the text's actionwho becomes mired in a confession of what he does not understand.