ISI Library

Other title information: Four essays

Annotation: College English Russian formalists emerged from the Russian Revolution with ideas about the independence of literature. They enjoyed that independence until Stalin shut them down. By then they had produced essays that remain among the best defenses ever written for both literature and its theory. Included here are four essays representing key points in the formalists' short history. Victor Scklovsky's pathbreaking "Art as Technique" (1917) vindicates disorder in literary style. His 1921 essay on Tristram Shandy makes that eccentric novel the centerpiece for a theory of narrative. A section from Tomashevsky's "Thematics" (1925) inventories the elements of stories. In "The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" (1927) Boris Eichenbaum defends Russian formalism from many attacks. An able champion, he describes formalism's evolution, notes its major workers and works, clears away decayed axioms, and rescues literature from "primitive historicism" and other dangers. These essays set a course for literary studies that led to Prague structuralism, French semiotics, and postmodern poetics. Russian Formalist Criticism has been honored as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year by the American Library Association.

Identifier: 9780803254602

Status: Available

Annotation: The most popular novel in Quebec since the Second World War, Yves Theriault's Agaguk was published just before the Quiet Revolution, a period of major political and cultural transformation that radically altered Quebec society at the beginning of the 1960s. In this original socio-semiotic reading of the novel in translation, inspired by A.J. Greimas and the Paris School of Semiotics, Paul Perron examines the Inuit setting and characters of Agaguk as metaphors for Quebec society. Semiotics and the Modern Quebec Novel is one of the few semiotic analyses to deal with an entire novel, and illustrates the heuristic value of this complex methodology with respect to long prose texts in English.

Identifier: 0802009263

Status: Available

Annotation: In this ground breaking work of synthesis, Monika Fludernik combines insights from literary theory and linguistics to provide a challenging new theory of narrative. This book is both an historical survey and theoretical study, with the author drawing on an enormous range of examples from the earliest oral study to contemporary experimental fiction. She uses these examples to prove that recent literature, far from heralding the final collapse of narrative, represents the epitome of a centuries long developmental process.

Identifier: 0415124824

Status: Available

Other title information: structuralism, Marxism, aesthetics of reception, semiotics

Annotation: This book takes stock of the major theoretical schools which hold sway over literary studies in the present age. Structuralism, Marxism, Aesthetics of Reception, and Semiotics are discussed in relation to their historical context and their present significance.

Identifier: 0312124481

Status: Available

Other title information: Four essays

Annotation: These essays reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)—known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky—as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel. The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology. Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another.

Identifier: 9780292715349

Status: Available