Studies in Comparative Literature and Intellectual History
This volume brings together an international group of scholars, poets, translators, and publishers to explore new developments in both poetry and translation and the fluid boundary between them. The unique format combines a series of conversations between leading poets whose writing is informed by the experience of translation and being translated with essays addressing theoretical, aesthetic, and cross-cultural aspects of contemporary poetry translation in English, German, and Russian.
This is the first volume to reconstruct and examine Soviet engagement with world literature from multiple institutional and disciplinary perspectives (intellectual history; literary history and theory; comparative literature; translation studies; diaspora studies); the book is a vital contribution to current debates on world literature in and beyond the field of Slavic and East European Studies.
This book is inspired by the author’s work as part of a major international and interdisciplinary research group at the University of Konstanz, Germany: “What If—On the Meaning, Relevance, and Epistemology of Counterfactual Claims and Thought Experiments.” Having contributed to great discoveries, such as those by Galileo and Einstein, thought experiments are especially topical in the twenty-first century, since this is a concept that bridges the gap between the arts and the sciences, promoting interdisciplinary innovation. To study thought experiments in literature, it is imperative to examine relevant texts closely: this has rarely been done to date and this is precisely what this book does as a pilot study focusing on selected works of philosophy and literature. Specifically, thought experiments by Thomas Malthus are analyzed side by side with short stories and novels by Vladimir Odoevsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Alexander Bogdanov and Aleksei Tolstoy, Alexander Chaianov and Nina Berberova.
This book demonstrates how world fiction by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje counters biopolitics with aesthetic and political—biopoetic—strategies producing transhistorical, transnational experiences offered to the reader for collective responsibility. It defines and explores heterotopic processes fostering a slant perspective that is feminist, materialist, anti-racist, and anti-war.
This book focuses on Dostoevsky’s first literary publication—his 1844 translation of the first edition of Balzac’s Eugе́nie Grandet (1834). Through the prism of close reading, the author analyzes Dostoevsky’s literary debut and the stylistic choices he made while working on Balzac’s novel in the context of his future mature aesthetic style and poetics.
A theoretical reexamination of the concept of the “tragic” combined with detailed analyses of Japanese literary texts. Inspired by Western critical theory, the author unveils a rich tradition of tragic literature in Japan that has registered the unbridgeable gap between universal ideals and social values at a historical moment.
These eyewitness accounts, gathered from archives and appearing in English for the first time, introduce the reader to Dostoevsky's unfortunates from the Dead House––condemned to share with him Russia's carceral system of confinement, interrogations, denunciations, and hostile spaces––whose psychoses become the writer's obsession in his celebrated crime novels.
The revisionist approach in this book, based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s work, traces the search for common and specific grounds of the humanities, beginning with psychologism through hermeneutics and semiotics up to the present state of self-annihilation. As an alternative, the book seeks to define humanities as the examination of relationships, which offers an array of refreshing perspectives on each field discussed.
