Persistent Forms
Explorations in Historical Poetics
Published on 14. December 2015
Book
Hardback
504 pages
978-0-8232-6485-8 (ISBN)
Description
Since the mid-1980s, attempts to think history and literature together have produced much exciting work in the humanities. Indeed, some form of historicism can be said to inform most of the current scholarship in literary studies, including work in poetics, yet much of this scholarship remains undertheorized.
Envisioning a revitalized and more expansive historicism, this volume builds on the tradition of Historical Poetics, pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838-1906) and developed in various fruitful directions by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg. The volume includes previously untranslated texts of some of the major scholars in this critical tradition, as well as original contributions which place that tradition in dialogue with other thinkers who have approached literature in a globally comparatist and evolutionary-historical spirit. The contributors seek to challenge and complement a historicism that stresses proximate sociopolitical contexts through an engagement with the longue duree of literary forms and institutions. In particular, Historical Poetics aims to uncover deep-historical stratifications and asynchronicities, in which formal solutions may display elective affinities with other, chronologically distant solutions to analogous social and political problems.
By recovering the traditional nexus of philology and history, Persistent Forms seeks to reinvigorate poetics as a theoretical discipline that would respond to such critical and intellectual developments as Marxism, New Historicism, the study of world literature, practices of distant reading, and a renewed attention to ritual, oral poetics, and genre.
Envisioning a revitalized and more expansive historicism, this volume builds on the tradition of Historical Poetics, pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838-1906) and developed in various fruitful directions by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg. The volume includes previously untranslated texts of some of the major scholars in this critical tradition, as well as original contributions which place that tradition in dialogue with other thinkers who have approached literature in a globally comparatist and evolutionary-historical spirit. The contributors seek to challenge and complement a historicism that stresses proximate sociopolitical contexts through an engagement with the longue duree of literary forms and institutions. In particular, Historical Poetics aims to uncover deep-historical stratifications and asynchronicities, in which formal solutions may display elective affinities with other, chronologically distant solutions to analogous social and political problems.
By recovering the traditional nexus of philology and history, Persistent Forms seeks to reinvigorate poetics as a theoretical discipline that would respond to such critical and intellectual developments as Marxism, New Historicism, the study of world literature, practices of distant reading, and a renewed attention to ritual, oral poetics, and genre.
Reviews / Votes
"Persistent Forms introduces major early exponents [and also offers] new applications that illustrate the continuing vitality [of Historical Poetics]. The juxtaposition of the older and newer essays not only lends interest to the book but also shows Historical Poetics at work, not only in the grander literature that is the authors' subject matter but also in the world of academic ideas about literature. A nice rhyme that makes for an especially attractive and interesting publication." -- -Emily Klenin University of California Los Angeles "This wide-ranging and stimulating volume goes a long way toward introducing English-language scholars to the perspectives opened by Veselovsky's literary scholarship. The essays contained in the collection are of a uniformly high quality, and they give the reader a keen sense of the legacy and the promise of Historical Poetics." -- -Daniel Heller-Roazen Princeton UniversityMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 236 mm
Width: 159 mm
Thickness: 48 mm
Weight
872 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8232-6485-8 (9780823264858)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
12/2015
1st Edition
Fordham University Press
€46.99
Available for download
E-Book
12/2015
1st Edition
Fordham University Press
€63.99
Available for download
Persons
Ilya Kliger is Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. He is the author of The Narrative Shape of Truth: Veridiction in Modern European Literature (Penn State University Press, 2011), as well as articles dealing with the history and theory of the novel in Russia and France, literary theory, and narratology. Currently, he is working on a book on the tragic social imaginary in the age of Russian Realism. Boris Maslov is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He has published articles on Homer and Archaic Greek lyric, the reception of the Pindaric ode, history of comparative literature, and historical semantics of Greek and Russian. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pindar and the Emergence of Literature. Eric Hayot is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Chinese Dreams (Michigan, 2004), The Hypothetical Mandarin (Oxford, 2009), On Literary Worlds (Oxford, 2012), and The Elements of Academic Style (Columbia, 2014).
Content
Contents Foreword by Eric Hayot 1. Introducing Historical Poetics: History, Experience, Form Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov Part I: Questioning the Historical, Envisioning a Poetics 2. From the Introduction to Historical Poetics: Questions and Answers (1894) Alexander Veselovsky 3. Alexander Veselovsky's Historical Poetics vs. Cultural Poetics: Remembering the Future Victoria Somoff 4. Historicist Hermeneutics and Contestatory Ritual Poetics: An Encounter between Pindaric Epinikion and Attic Tragedy Leslie Kurke 5. Three Extensions of Veselovsky's Historical Poetics: Metapragmatics, Toposforschung, Marxist Stylistics Boris Maslov Part II: The Life of Forms: Tradition, Memory, Regeneration 6. The Oresteia in the Odyssey (1946) Olga Freidenberg 7. Innovation Disguised as Tradition: Commentary and the Genesis of Art Forms Nina V. Braginskaya 8. A Remnant Poetics: Excavating the Chronotope of the Kurgan Michael Kunichika 9. On "Genre Memory" in Bakhtin Ilya Kliger Part III: Comparative Poetics and the Historicity of Experience 10. The Age of Sensibility (1904) Alexander Veselovsky 11. Against Ornament: O. M. Freidenberg's Concept of Metaphor in Ancient and Modern Contexts Richard Martin 12. Breakfast at Dawn: Alexander Veselovsky and the Poetics of Psychological Biography Ilya Vinitsky 13. From the Prehistory of Russian Novel Theory: Alexander Veselovsky and Fyodor Dostoevsky on the Modern Novel's Roots in Folklore and Legend Kate Holland Part IV: Literary Genres in the Longue Duree 14. Satire (1940) Mikhail Bakhtin 15. Columbus's Egg, or the Structure of the Novella (1973) Mikhail Gasparov 16. On the Eve of Epic: Did the Chryses Episode in Iliad 1 Begin its Life as a Separate Homeric Hymn? Christopher Faraone 17. Schematics and Models of Genre: Bakhtin and Soviet Satire Robert Bird Notes Further Readings in Historical Poetics List of Contributors Index