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Focuses on the highly diverse and controversial literary and cultural life in Russia during the last twenty years of the past century. Major shifts on the political scene influenced Russian literature of these past two decades. Literature managed to find in the political and historical turbulence of this period a source of powerful artistic insight.
Postmodern Crises collects previously published and yet unpublished Mark Lipovetsky's articles on Russian literature and film. Written in different years, they focus on cultural and aesthetic crises that, taken together, constitute the postmodern condition of Russian culture. The reader will find here articles about classic subversive texts (such as Nabokov's Lolita), performances (Pussy Riot), and recent, but also subversive, films. Other articles discuss such authors as Vladimir Sorokin, such sociocultural discourses as the discourse of scientific intelligentsia; post-Soviet adaptations of Socialist Realism, and contemporary trends of "complex" literature, as well as literary characters turned into cultural tropes (the Strugatsky's progressors). The book will be interesting for teachers and scholars of contemporary Russian literature and culture; it can be used both in undergraduate and graduate courses.
Political histories of the Soviet Union have portrayed a powerful Kremlin leadership whose will was passively implemented by regional Party officials and institutions. Drawing on his research in recently opened archives in Moscow and the Urals—a vast territory that is a vital center of the Russian mining and metallurgy industries—James R. Harris overturns this view. He argues here that the regions have for centuries had strong identities and interests and that they cumulatively exerted a significant influence on Soviet policy-making and on the evolution of the Soviet system.After tracing the development of local interests prior to the Revolution, Harris demonstrates that a desperate need...
The present volume focuses on the postcoloniality of the Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Czech literatures from post-communist times and that of the translingual diaspora. The contributions deal with the exploration of literary representation and hence of postcolonial textuality - of poetics, textual structures, rhetoric, and tropes.
This wide-ranging collection investigates the father/son dynamic in post-Stalinist Soviet cinema and its Russian successor. Contributors analyze complex patterns of identification, disavowal, and displacement in films by such diverse directors as Khutsiev, Motyl', Tarkovsky, Balabanov, Sokurov, Todorovskii, Mashkov, and Bekmambetov. Several chapters focus on the difficulties of fulfilling the paternal function, while others show how vertical and horizontal male bonds are repeatedly strained by the pressure of redefining an embattled masculinity in a shifting political landscape.
This thought-provoking work analyzes concrete political events and reinterprets key concepts in modern political science. Building on the works of Kant, Badiou, Adorno, Hegel, and more, it posits that the dynamics of revolution can be encapsulated in the concept of negation, since a revolution essentially negates "what is" by rejecting the power in place. The work argues that revolution is the true ground of Western democracy and that the proof of a true democracy is the activity of protest movements. It discusses how modern philosophy conceives political truth as revolutionary or eventful, and that one aspect of revolution is negativity, which fluctuates between inertia and melancholia. It examines the problem of revolution in the context of modern philosophy, providing a diagnosis of the historical developments since the fall of the Soviet Union to the Arab Spring, setting forth an original theory of revolution while shedding light on the notion of negativity in contemporary thought. This innovative work will appeal to anyone interested in political theory and political philosophy.
The twentieth century in Russia has been a cataclysm of rare proportions, as war, revolution, famine, and massive political terror tested the limits of human endurance. The results of this assault on Russian culture are particularly evident in ruined architectural monuments, some of which are little known even within Russia itself. Over the past two decades William Craft Brumfield, noted historian of Russian architecture, has traveled throughout Russia and photographed many of these neglected, lost buildings, haunting in their ruin. Lost Russia provides a unique view of Brumfield's acclaimed work, which illuminates Russian culture as reflected in these remnants of its distinctive architectural traditions.
This collection of articles takes up the issue of Contact Morphology raised by David Wilkins in 1996. In the majority of contact-related studies, morphology is at best a marginal topic. According to the extant borrowing hierarchies, bound morphology is copied only rarely, if at all, because morphological copies presuppose long-term intensive contact with prior massive borrowing of content words and function words. On the other hand, especially in studies of morphological change, contact is often identified as the decisive factor which triggers the disintegration of morphological systems. However, it remains to be seen whether these two standard treatments of morphology in contact situations ...
Profoundly concerned with the properties of access, perceptual complexity, and pragmatic presuppositions, here formalized as a calculus of markedness, this study attempts to provide a highly principled explanation of morphological complexity and change. Here, markedness is construed as a qualitative statement, as a natural parametric device, and not as an empirically empty algorithmic tool. This work is fundamentally concerned with iconicity as a property of grammatical encoding. A major contribution to a dynamic theory of language as a communicative endeavor, this study is strongly oriented towards universals with prognostic capacity. Moreover, the terms morphology and naturalness are here given biological reference, keyed as they are to the basis for a biology of language, and it is thus altogether fitting that this first English-language version of a work that has long enjoyed critical airing in Europe be prefaced with an essay by none less than Rupert Riedl -- Back cover.