Russian Experimental Fiction

Russian Experimental Fiction

Author: Edith W. Clowes

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1400863538

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In the three decades following Stalin's death, major underground Russian writers have subverted Soviet ideology by using parody to draw attention to its basis in utopian thought. Referring to utopian writing as diverse as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, and Orwell's Animal Farm, they have tested notions of truth, reality, and representation. They have gone beyond their precursors by experimenting with the tensions between ludic and didactic art. Edith Clowes explores these "meta-utopian" narratives, which address a wide range of attitudes toward utopia, to expose the challenge that literary play poses to dogmatism and to elucidate the sense of renewal it can bring to social imagination. Using both structural analysis and reception theory, she introduces readers outside Russia to a fascinating body of literature that includes Aleksandr Zinoviev's The Yawning Heights, Abram Terts's Liubimov, Vladimir Voinovich's Moscow 2042, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia's "The New Robinsons.". Not advocating its own utopian alternative to current social realities, meta-utopian fiction investigates the function of a deep human impulse to imagine, project, and enforce alternative social orders. Clowes examines the technical innovations meta-utopian writers have made in style, image, and narrative structure that inform fresh modes of social imagination. Her analysis leads to an inquiry into the intended and real audiences of this fiction, and into the ways its authors try to move them toward more sophisticated social discourse. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


The Nightmare Feast

The Nightmare Feast

Author: Andrew Klavan

Publisher: Turner Publishing Company

Published: 2020-03-03

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 168442268X

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“As screenwriter Austin Lively plunges back and forth between two dark, strange places―the fantasy kingdom of Galiana and the weirdness of contemporary Los Angeles―I turned the pages faster, faster, with growing delight. Scary, suspenseful, funny, wonderfully imaginative, Another Kingdom is pure, unadulterated fun.”― Dean Koontz, #1 New York Times Bestselling author "This is a journey you won't want to miss." Gregg Hurwitz, New York Times Bestselling author of the Orphan X series Austin Lively, once just an out-of-luck Hollywood screenwriter, is now a chosen hero caught between two worlds and dual quests in both Los Angeles, California, and the magical medieval world of Galiana. Tasked with taking a talisman across the Eleven Lands to restore the rightful queen to her throne, Austin must evade a murderous, vengeance-seeking wizard who seems to have the Eleven Lands under his control. But just how far does his influence reach, and how can Austin defeat him if the wizard also has access to his darkest memories? Austin’s only hope is to find a missing manuscript by the title, Another Kingdom, but his sister Riley, the one person who may hold the key has gone missing too. With a deranged billionaire set on creating a “utopia” of anarchy and death also on the hunt for the manuscript, Austin must get to Riley before the billionaire’s assassins. Trapped in a house of horrors in one world and a game of cat and mouse in the other, time is running out in both of Austin’s realities as he struggles to piece together the clues and find Another Kingdom. With higher stakes, darker secrets, and bigger monsters, there is no going back for Austin Lively and no guarantee he will escape the nightmare feast.


The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature

The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature

Author: Joe Bray

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-07-26

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 1136301747

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What is experimental literature? How has experimentation affected the course of literary history, and how is it shaping literary expression today? Literary experiment has always been diverse and challenging, but never more so than in our age of digital media and social networking, when the very category of the literary is coming under intense pressure. How will literature reconfigure itself in the future? The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature maps this expansive and multifaceted field, with essays on: the history of literary experiment from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present the impact of new media on literature, including multimodal literature, digital fiction and code poetry the development of experimental genres from graphic narratives and found poetry through to gaming and interactive fiction experimental movements from Futurism and Surrealism to Postmodernism, Avant-Pop and Flarf. Shedding new light on often critically neglected terrain, the contributors introduce this vibrant area, define its current state, and offer exciting new perspectives on its future. This volume is the ideal introduction for those approaching the study of experimental literature for the first time or looking to further their knowledge.


Fiction's Overcoat

Fiction's Overcoat

Author: Edith W. Clowes

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1501727028

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If Dostoevsky claimed that all Russian writers of his day "came out from Gogol's 'Overcoat,'" then Edith W. Clowes boldly expands his dramatic image to describe the emergence of Russian philosophy out from under the "overcoat" of Russian literature. In Fiction's Overcoat, Clowes responds to the view, commonly held by Western European and North American thinkers, that Russian culture has no philosophical tradition. If that is true, she asks, why do readers everywhere turn to the classics of Russian literature, at least in part because Russian writers so famously engage universal questions, because they are so "philosophical"? Her answer to this question is a lively and comprehensive volume that details the origins, submergence, and re-emergence of a rich and vital Russian philosophical tradition.During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russian philosophy emerged in conversation with narrative fiction, radical journalism, and speculative theology, developing a distinct cultural discourse with its own claim to authority and truth. Leading Russian thinkers—Berdiaev, Losev, Rozanov, Shestov, and Solovyov—made philosophy the primary forum in which Russians debated metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical questions as well as issues of individual and national identity. That debate was tragically truncated by the events of 1917 and the rise of the Soviet empire. Today, after seventy years of enforced silence, this particularly Russian philosophical culture has resurfaced. Fiction's Overcoat serves as a welcome guide to its complexities and nuances.Historians and cultural critics will find in Clowes's book the story of the increasing refinement and diversification of Russian cultural discourse, philosophers will find an alternative to the Western philosophical tradition, and students of literature will enjoy the opportunity to rethink the great Russian novelists—particularly Dostoevsky, Pasternak, and Platonov—as important voices in the process of shaping and sustaining a new philosophy and ensuring its survival into our own age.


Russia on the Edge

Russia on the Edge

Author: Edith W. Clowes

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-04-15

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0801461146

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Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have confronted a major crisis of identity. Soviet ideology rested on a belief in historical progress, but the post-Soviet imagination has obsessed over territory. Indeed, geographical metaphors—whether axes of north vs. south or geopolitical images of center, periphery, and border—have become the signs of a different sense of self and the signposts of a new debate about Russian identity. In Russia on the Edge Edith W. Clowes argues that refurbished geographical metaphors and imagined geographies provide a useful perspective for examining post-Soviet debates about what it means to be Russian today. Clowes lays out several sides of the debate. She takes as a backdrop the strong criticism of Soviet Moscow and its self-image as uncontested global hub by major contemporary writers, among them Tatyana Tolstaya and Viktor Pelevin. The most vocal, visible, and colorful rightist ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, the founder of neo-Eurasianism, has articulated positions contested by such writers and thinkers as Mikhail Ryklin, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Anna Politkovskaia, whose works call for a new civility in a genuinely pluralistic Russia. Dugin’s extreme views and their many responses—in fiction, film, philosophy, and documentary journalism—form the body of this book. In Russia on the Edge literary and cultural critics will find the keys to a vital post-Soviet writing culture. For intellectual historians, cultural geographers, and political scientists the book is a guide to the variety of post-Soviet efforts to envision new forms of social life, even as a reconstructed authoritarianism has taken hold. The book introduces nonspecialist readers to some of the most creative and provocative of present-day Russia’s writers and public intellectuals.


Revolutionary Dreams

Revolutionary Dreams

Author: Richard Stites

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1991-11-14

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0199878951

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The revolutionary ideals of equality, communal living, proletarian morality, and technology worship, rooted in Russian utopianism, generated a range of social experiments which found expression, in the first decade of the Russian revolution, in festival, symbol, science fiction, city planning, and the arts. In this study, historian Richard Stites offers a vivid portrayal of revolutionary life and the cultural factors--myth, ritual, cult, and symbol--that sustained it, and describes the principal forms of utopian thinking and experimental impulse. Analyzing the inevitable clash between the authoritarian elements in the Bolshevik's vision and the libertarian behavior and aspirations of large segments of the population, Stites interprets the pathos of utopian fantasy as the key to the emotional force of the Bolshevik revolution which gave way in the early 1930s to bureaucratic state centralism and a theology of Stalinism.


Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov

Author: Daniel Philip Todes

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 897

ISBN-13: 0199925194

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This is a definitive, deeply researched biography of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) and is the first scholarly biography to be published in any language. The book is Todes's magnum opus, which he has been working on for some twenty years. Todes makes use of a wealth of archival material to portray Pavlov's personality, life, times, and scientific work. Combining personal documents with a close reading of scientific texts, Todes fundamentally reinterprets Pavlov's famous research on conditional reflexes. Contrary to legend, Pavlov was not a behaviorist (a misimpression captured in the false iconic image of his "training a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell"); rather, he sought to explain not simply external behaviors, but the emotional and intellectual life of animals and humans. This iconic "objectivist" was actually a profoundly anthropomorphic thinker whose science was suffused with his own experiences, values, and subjective interpretations. This book is also a traditional "life and times" biography that weaves Pavlov into some 100 years of Russian history-particularly that of its intelligentsia--from the emancipation of the serfs to Stalin's time. Pavlov was born to a family of priests in provincial Ryazan before the serfs were emancipated, made his home and professional success in the glittering capital of St. Petersburg in late imperial Russia, suffered the cataclysmic destruction of his world during the Bolshevik seizure of power and civil war of 1917- 1921, rebuilt his life in his 70s as a "prosperous dissident" during the Leninist 1920s, and flourished professionally as never before in 1929-1936 during the industrialization, revolution, and terror of Stalin. Todes's story of this powerful personality and extraordinary man is based upon interviews with surviving coworkers and family members (along with never-before-analyzed taped interviews from the 1960s and 1970s), examination of hundreds of scientific works


The Experimental Novel, and Other Essays

The Experimental Novel, and Other Essays

Author: Emile Zola

Publisher: Sagwan Press

Published: 2015-08-21

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 9781298905185

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