Constructive Postmodernism: Toward Renewal in Cultural and Literary Studies

Providing a comprehensive reading of Deleuzian philosophy, Gilles Deleuze’s Luminous Philosophy argues that this philosophy’s most consistent conceptual spine and figure of thought is its inherent luminism. When Deleuze notes in Cinema 1 that ‘the plane of immanence is entirely made up of light’, he ties this philosophical luminism directly to the notion of the complementarity of the photon in its aspects of both particle and wave. Engaging, in chronological order, the whole body and range of Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, the book traces the ‘line of light’ that runs through Deleuze’s work, and it considers the implications of Deleuze’s luminism for the fields of literary studies, historical studies, the visual arts and cinema studies. It contours Deleuze’s luminism both against recent studies that promote a ‘dark Deleuze’ and against the prevalent view that Deleuzian philosophy is a philosophy of difference. Instead, it argues, it is a philosophy of the complementarity of difference and diversity, considered as two reciprocally determining fields that are, in Deleuze’s view, formally distinct but ontologically one. The book, which is the companion volume toFélix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Ecology, argues that the ‘real projective plane’ is the ‘surface of thought’ of Deleuze’s philosophical luminism.

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Context Mediated

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.1525/ncl.2017.72.1.35 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 72 (1) ◽

pp. 35-63

Author(s):

Benjamin Pickford

Keyword(s):

Political Economy ◽

Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽

Literary Text ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Economic Relation ◽

Economic Agency

Benjamin Pickford, “Context Mediated: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Political Economy of Plagiarism” (pp. 35–63) Context has long been a critical determiner of methodologies for literary studies, granting scholars the tools to make objective claims about a text’s political or economic relation to the situation of its genesis. This essay argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson anticipatively criticizes our commitment to such practices through his use of plagiarism—a literary mode that exemplifies the denial of the sovereignty of context. I focus on two core principles that underlie Emerson’s conception of literature’s civic role in Essays: Second Series (1844): first, that literature is driven by an impulse to decontextualize; second, that this means that it has a deep affinity with the deterritorializing logic of capital. Provocatively proposing Emerson as a theorist of the relation between literature and economics, I argue that Essays: Second Series shows how the literary text can negotiate its ineluctable culpability with capitalism, but this does not mean that it can presume to possess a privileged point of vantage that might deny such culpability. Given that this is precisely what much historicizing or contextualizing scholarship implies, I contend that Emerson gives us a case study in the limits of literature and criticism’s economic agency.

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L.I. Strakhovsky: Between Symbolism and Acmeism (Based on Foreign Publications)

Observatory of Culture ◽

10.25281/2072-3156-2020-17-4-426-437 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 17 (4) ◽

pp. 426-437

Author(s):

Nikolay N. Nosov

Keyword(s):

Mutual Influence ◽

Cultural Influence ◽

Russian Language ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Usual Sense ◽

Creative Evolution ◽

Russian State ◽

Library Resources ◽

Individual Features ◽

State Library

The article is devoted to L.I. Strakhovsky (alias Leonid Chatsky; 1898—1963), a Russian writer and poet of the first wave of emigration, and his poetry and prose reflected in foreign publications of his works in Russian. Returning to our culture the name of this author, now half-forgotten in his homeland, and introducing this name into literary studies, the article tries to reveal the thematic and stylistic diversity of L.I. Strakhovsky’s poetry and prose. The research’s object is foreign publications of L.I. Strakhovsky’s artistic works in separate books, almanacs and periodicals published in Belgium, Germany, Canada and identified through collection catalogues of leading Russian libraries (the Russian State library, the Alexander Solzhenitsyn House of Russia Abroad) and library resources that display foreign Russian-language publications by L.I. Strakhovsky. The article highlights and analyzes the main stylistic (symbolism, acmeism, “junior acmeism”) and thematic (autobiographical, English, mystical) components of L.I. Strakhovsky’s works, reveals the components’ individual features, the originality of their constancy and mutual influence. The main of these features is that L.I. Strakhovsky’s works can be stylistically periodized on the basis of the author’s increased propensity to cyclize his works though without creative evolution in the usual sense and with the stable nature of his working throughout his life. To review the publications and analyze the nature of L.I. Strakhovsky’s works, the article draws on the context of Russian and emigrant literature of his era, creatively associated with L.I. Strakhovsky and its main figures, and notes his literary and cultural influence.

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The Founding Attempts of the Literary Historian. Solitudes, Singularities, Exemplarities

Philobiblon Transylvanian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Humanities ◽

10.26424/philobib.2020.25.2.12 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 25 (2) ◽

pp. 385-398

Author(s):

Ioana Bot

Keyword(s):

Literary History ◽

Scientific Journal ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Research School ◽

Critical Editions

The present study reviews D. Popovici’s founding attempts in the field of literary history. It pursues his activity along four axes: critical editions of modern Romanian authors, studies in literary history, university lectures and “Studii literare” [Literary Studies], the scientific journal he founded as a professor of Cluj University. Both original and modern in his theoretic, methodologic as well as academic options, Popovici is a founder of institutions and initiator of a research school. His scientific projects are singular in their scope. Yet his critic posterity destines him to an unwarranted “singularity”. Our reflection focuses upon the exemplary elements in the scholar’s destiny.

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The problem of woman’s emansipation in the feuilleton “Amazonia: a very inept story” by Mykola Chirsky

LITERARY PROCESS methodology names trends ◽

10.28925/2412-2475.2020.15.11 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 71-76

Author(s):

Iryna Rusnak

Keyword(s):

Scientific Understanding ◽

The Other ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Ethical Guidelines ◽

Compositional Structure ◽

Urgent Task ◽

The Subject ◽

The One ◽

Artistic Heritage

The author of the article analyses the problem of the female emancipation in the little-known feuilleton “Amazonia: A Very Inept Story” (1924) by Mykola Chirsky. The author determines the genre affiliation of the work and examines its compositional structure. Three parts are distinguished in the architectonics of associative feuilleton: associative conception; deployment of a “small” topic; conclusion. The author of the article clarifies the role of intertextual elements and the method of constantly switching the tone from serious to comic to reveal the thematic direction of the work. Mykola Chirsky’s interest in the problem of female emancipation is corresponded to the general mood of the era. The subject of ridicule in provocative feuilleton is the woman’s radical metamorphoses, since repulsive manifestations of emancipation becomes commonplace. At the same time, the writer shows respect for the woman, appreciates her femininity, internal and external beauty, personality. He associates the positive in women with the functions of a faithful wife, a caring mother, and a skilled housewife. In feuilleton, the writer does not bypass the problem of the modern man role in a family, but analyses the value and moral and ethical guidelines of his character. The husband’s bad habits receive a caricatured interpretation in the strange behaviour of relatives. On the one hand, the writer does not perceive the extremes brought by female emancipation, and on the other, he mercilessly criticises the male “virtues” of contemporaries far from the standard. The artistic heritage of Mykola Chirsky remains little studied. The urgent task of modern literary studies is the introduction of Mykola Chirsky’s unknown works into the scientific circulation and their thorough scientific understanding.

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