The New School of Literary History in Russia

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-132
Author(s):  
Boris Tomashevsky ◽  
Gina Fisch ◽  
Oleg Gelikman

Anthologies of literary theory, the backbone of courses on literary criticism, rely on viktor Shklovsky's “Art as a Device” or Boris Eikhenbaum's “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method‘” to broach the subject of Russian formalism. The canonical status of these essays is well deserved. Written when the author was merely twenty-four, Shklovsky's 1917 essay bristles with a polemical fervor, wit, and knack for example that announce him as a critical prodigy. Marked by the mixture of embittered pride, rigor, and self-conscious malaise typical of later formalism, Eikhenbaum's dense history of the formal school is remarkable for its titanic effort to marry historical considerations to a systematic analysis of the evolution of key formalist doctrines.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felta Lafamane

AbstractNormatively, literary studies are divided into several fields, namely literary theory, literary history, literary criticism, comparative literature and literary studies. Literary theory studies people's views of literature. Literary history seeks to compile and study literary works as part of the process of intellectual history in one society. The history of literary theory can be seen as part of philosophical thinking because the history of literary theory itself is the same as the history of human thought towards art or literary objects which emphasize the more practical nature of the translation of concepts. Literary theory itself can essentially be equated with the science of beauty or aesthetics. Science and theory are certainly one different thing. With such an assumption, writing the history of literary theory is the same as writing aesthetic history in the field of literary arts. However, the history of the theory needs to be known and understood so that there are no mistakes in thinking about these two things. Literary theory itself has various meanings along with the paradigm it carries. Literary theory is defined as a set of ideas and methods used to practice literary reading. Literary theory is also interpreted as a way or step to understand literature. The views in literary theory also experience changes along with the development of human thinking.Keyword: development, literary theory, history, literature


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 183
Author(s):  
Rafael Guimarães Tavares Silva

Resumo: Buscando situar o contexto alemão do final do séc. XIX e início do séc. XX, no tocante às práticas de ensino e, mais especificamente, do ensino de literatura, o presente artigo oferece considerações sobre a forma como Walter Benjamin se posiciona nesse debate. Depois de abordar de forma mais geral a produção desse arguto pensador da cultura de seu tempo, a importância fundamental de seu texto História da literatura e ciência da literatura [Literaturgeschichte und Literaturwissenschaft], de 1931, assume o primeiro plano da argumentação e oferece o material para que se sugira a radicalidade do projeto benjaminiano. Detectando uma crise cultural profunda em sua época, o estudioso sugere que um posicionamento crítico, apto a articular o passado e o presente, por meio de um estudo envolvendo História da Literatura e Crítica Literária, seria a única forma de potencializar o estudo das Letras, de modo a converter a Literatura em órganon capaz de atuar diretamente sobre a própria História.Palavras-chave: Walter Benjamin; teoria literária; crítica literária; história literária; educação.Abstract: Seeking to situate the teaching practices and especially literary teaching practices in the German context of the end of the XIXth century and beginning of the XXth, this article offers considerations on how Walter Benjamin takes a position in this debate. After a more general approach to the intellectual production of this argute thinker of his own culture and time, the fundamental importance of his text History of literature and science of literature [Literaturgeschichte und Literaturwissenschaft], from 1931, takes the foreground of the argument and offers material to suggest the radicalness of Benjamin’s project. Detecting a deep cultural crisis in his time, he suggests that a critical position, capable of articulating the past and the present, through a study involving History of Literature and Literary Criticism, would be the only way to strengthen the study of Letters, in order to transform Literature into an organon capable of acting directly on History itself.Keywords: Walter Benjamin; literary theory; literary criticism; literary history; education.


2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
DEVIN O. PENDAS

When the late Kenneth Cmiel undertook the first systematic analysis of the emerging historiography of human rights in 2004, he surveyed a field that was ‘refreshingly inchoate’. In the ensuing seven years, the scholarship on the history of human rights has burgeoned considerably. Yet one might still reasonably characterise the field overall as inchoate. Like any new subfield of historical inquiry, there is a clear lack of consensus among leading historians of human rights about even the most elementary contours of the subject. What are human rights? When and where did they emerge? How and why did they spread (if, indeed, they spread at all)? Who were the crucial agents in this history? Few historians working in the field seem to agree in their answers to any of these questions.


1991 ◽  
Vol 7 (25) ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Richard Andrews

The regular community drama activity of the village of Monticchiello in Italy has been pursued for nearly a quarter of a century, but is still little known abroad. A full study of the phenomenon is as much a study of the community, past and present, as it is a piece of theatrical analysis, in the area where there is a complete interlock between social history and the theatrical activity which a society produces. Since the work and history of the Teatro Povero have too many ramifications for everything to be summarized or even alluded to in one article, Richard Andrews here sets out to introduce the subject to students of theatre ‘by example’ – aiming to dig a single trench into the strata, in order to convey the outlines of the subject, hopefully without damage to the evidence needed for a more complete survey. Richard Andrews is Professor of Italian at Leeds University, having previously taught at Swansea and Kent. For the past fifteen years his research interests have been mainly concentrated on theatrical material, and he is currently preparing a study of sixteenth-century Italian comedy for Cambridge University Press. His regular contact with Monticchiello dates from 1983, and has been supported by a systematic analysis of all the texts produced there since 1967.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tilman Venzl

In the 18th century, as many as 300 German-language plays were produced with the military and its contact and friction with civil society serving as focus of the dramatic events. The immense public interest these plays attracted feeds not least on the fundamental social structural change that was brought about by the establishment of standing armies. In his historico-cultural literary study, Tilman Venzl shows how these military dramas literarily depict complex social processes and discuss the new problems in an affirmative or critical manner. For the first time, the findings of the New Military History are comprehensively included in the literary history of the 18th century. Thus, the example of selected military dramas – including Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm and Lenz's Die Soldaten – reveals the entire range of variety characterizing the history of both form and function of the subject.


2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-217
Author(s):  
Vanja Radakovic

In the history of philosophy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is mainly considered as an atypical philosopher of the Enlightenment, as a pioneer of the revolutionary idea of a free civilian state and natural law; in literary history, he is considered the forerunner of Romanticism, the writer who perfected the form of an epistolary novel, as well as a sentimentalist. However, this paper focuses on the biographical approach, which was mostly excluded in observation of those works revealing Rousseau as the originator of the autobiographical novelistic genre. The subject of this paper is the issue of credibility of self-portraits, and through this problem it highlights the facts from the author?s life. This paper relies on a biographical approach, not in the positivistic sense but in the phenomenological key. This paper is mainly inspired by the works of the Geneva School theorists - Starobinski, Poulet and Rousset.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 9-47
Author(s):  
Maria Neklyudova

In his Bibliotheca historica, Diodorus Siculus described a peculiar Egyptian custom of judging all the dead (including the pharaohs) before their burial. The Greek historian saw it as a guarantee of Egypt’s prosperity, since the fear of being deprived of the right to burial served as a moral imperative. This story of an Egyptian custom fascinated the early modern authors, from lawyers to novelists, who often retold it in their own manner. Their interpretations varied depending on the political context: from the traditional “lesson to sovereigns” to a reassessment of the role of the subject and the duties of the orator. This article traces several intellectual trajectories that show the use and misuse of this Egyptian custom from Montaigne to Bossuet and then to Rousseau—and finally its adaptation by Pushkin and Vyazemsky, who most likely became acquainted with it through the mediation of French literature. The article was written in the framework (and with the generous support) of the RANEPA (ШАГИ РАНХиГС) state assignment research program. KEYWORDS: 16th to 19th-Century European and Russian Literature, Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712—1778), Alexander Pushkin (1799—1837), Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky (1792—1878), Egyptian Сourt, Locus communis, Political Rhetoric, Literary Criticism, Pantheonization, History of Ideas.


PMLA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-298
Author(s):  
James Mulholland

This article proposes a new literary history of British Asia that examines its earliest communities and cultural institutions in translocal and regional registers. Combining translocalism and regionalism redefines Anglo‐Indian writing as constituted by multisited forces, only one of which is the reciprocal exchange between Britain and its colonies that has been the prevailing emphasis of literary criticism about empire. I focus on the eighteenth century's overlooked military men and lowlevel colonial administrators who wrote newspaper verse, travel poetry, and plays. I place their compositions in an institutional chronicle defined by the “cultural company‐state,” the British East India Company, which patronized and censored Anglo- India's multilingual reading publics. In the process of arguing for Anglo‐Indian literature as a local and regional creation, I consider the how the terms British and anglophone should function in literary studies of colonialism organized not by hybridity or creolization but by geographic relations of distinction. (JM)


2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-402
Author(s):  
NORBERT BANDIER

The time has come for researchers into innovative movements in art and literature in the first half of the twentieth century to break free from traditional investigative frameworks. The works reviewed here belong to different disciplines – art history, literary history, literary criticism, history – but all show a shift of perspectives in the history of culture. They point to a reassessment of the theoretical models we use to understand modern art and literature. Those models are – in this case as they relate to the avant-garde – nuanced, refined, developed and sometimes even invalidated. Though some of these works are not wholly devoted to the European avant-gardes, they do deal with the international circulation of modern art in, to or from Europe, studied here in its lesser-known aspects. Moreover, they all to some extent examine the artist’s responsibility to the community, or the state’s responsibility to art. This theme of responsibility runs through all these works, either in its ethical dimension or as an aspect of the social function of art, especially when art has to confront an entertainment culture or is roped in as part of cultural policy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-545
Author(s):  
Suaibatul Aslamiyah ◽  
Suci Nadilla ◽  
Cindy Aprilia Pratami

Art has opened the eyes of the world throught literary works that record the history of a writing. Also the subject of women’s affairs is subject to an author’s reference to the problem of a sense of injustice. Such views have been discussed to voice gender equality and to seek efforts to overcome those problems. Nadia’s asthma is one of the authors who attempt to awaken women to the patriarchate system that has been going on. His works consistently incorporate such universal values as equality in various fields, human freedom, and tolerance so that his readers can adopt the value of life. In addition, she was actively involved in social media as a means of channeling her mind. The twitter feed says some of the people were repressed. Seeing the account encourage him to make a book and then be poured into a storybook of several different stories and in which one of the women’s true account t with the tittle of a jealous heart note. The study used qualitative descriptive methods with the theory of feminist literary criticism.


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