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

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

Publié le par Julien Desrochers

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 Formalism within a broader European context of literary, philosophical, and political reflection on modernity. The historical metamorphosis of estrangement from a technique of art to an existential art of survival and a practice of freedom and dissent is traced here through Victor Shklovsky's experimental autobiographical texts 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 aesthetic and political practices in Stalin's time. Shklovsky's writing on estrangement and freedom is read together with Hannah Arendt's reflections 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 long time. However, Immanuel Kant's Copernican revolution marks a new and deeper degree of alienation. Kant's definition of the subject—denied contact with the world as such and forced constantly to synthesize the immediacy of intuitions with the lawfulness of concepts—is a hopelessly riven "I-think." Reading Kant was a traumatic event for contemporaries, especially for philosophers, who attempted to make the world whole again by formulating new versions of absolute unity. It was Wilhelm von Humboldt who theorized a way both to accept the gap in Kantian epistemology and, at least partially—through language understood as inner speech—to overcome the gap. Reacting to later appropriations of von Humboldt, Russian linguists and such literary theorists as Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Sergej Karcevskij, and Mikhail Bakhtin explored the complexity of alienation in language and offered proposals for negotiating it 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 Shklovsky and Mikhail Bakhtin each utilize "aesthetic distance" in an unconventional way—unrelated, it would seem, to the usual aesthetic criteria of beauty, goodness, or truth. For the Formalist Shklovsky, the distancing or estrangement of an object sharpens our perception and stimulates our senses, thereby arousing us to artistic (as opposed to drably everyday) experience. For the dialogic Bakhtin, the mandate to "be outside" that which you create is a matter of subject-subject relations, not subject-object. This essay considers only one aspect of this intersection: the role of pain (the hurting body as the norm) in these two aesthetic economies, 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 formulated in a number of texts written before the October revolution of 1917. The concept of estrangement can only be properly grasped if the early Shklovsky is placed in the context of World War I; we need to begin to see him as an author shaped by that war and as a participant in the larger constellation of brilliant European essayists who responded to this momentous event. To this end, the article draws parallels between his writings and those of Ernst Jünger and Georg Simmel. More importantly, it uncovers the conservative aspects of Shklovsky's theory of estrangement and analyzes his contradictory attitudes toward democracy and modernization. The final section traces the fortunes of Shklovsky's concept of estrangement at the hands of its most significant 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 concept of estrangement as it extends to the experience of Russian writers in exile, following the October revolution. The discussion, informed by diaspora theory, begins with Shklovsky's stay in Berlin in 1922–23, when border crossings were still possible. He argued for literature's independence from politics. The dynamics of diasporic literary life and its evolving "articulations of identity" 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. Aleksei Remizov relied on estrangement in linguistic and genre experiments in exile that encompass historical changes in the Russian language at home and abroad. The poet Vladislav Khodasevich argued for the creative continuity of Russian literature in exile, citing past models, from Dante to the Hebrew Poetic Renaissance in the Russian empire at the turn of the twentieth century.

- Nancy Ruttenburg,  " Dostoevsky's Estrangement "

Abstract: During the transitional period between the early works of the late 1840s and production of the "great novels" in the mid-1860s, Dostoevsky confronted the problem of the Russian common people with particular urgency and immediacy. The consolations of the social theories which underlay his earlier political activism—and for which he suffered a decade of Siberian exile, spent partly in a hard-labor camp— withered in the face of actual, enforced contact with the common class. Upon his return to the capital on the eve of peasant emancipation in 1861, Dostoevsky staked the resurrection of his authorial career on his insistence that an abyss divided common and elite cultures which would bedevil elite attempts to represent the Russian common people as objects of literary and journalistic inquiry. At a moment when intellectuals and other urban elites struggled to prepare bureaucratically and imaginatively for a liberated peasantry, estrangement became the cornerstone of Dostoevsky's aesthetic practice. Instead of rendering a naturalistic portrait of the common people enhanced by the pathos of a firsthand knowledge bought dear, Dostoevsky traces in his fictionalized account of his prison experience, Notes from the House of the Dead, a peculiar disintegration of the narrating consciousness for whom estrangement emerges as the condition by which the peasant-other can be known and the limitations of knowing acknowledged and suffered. This article explores the genesis in fictionalized autobiography of the Dostoevskian narrator familiar to readers of thegreat novels, a narrator who dismantles the very structure of knowing and telling, a would-be guide to the text's action who becomes mired in a confession of what he does not understand.