Viktor Shklovsky’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy

Slav N. Gratchev is associate professor of Spanish at Marshall University.Howard Mancing is professor emeritus of Spanish at Purdue University.

Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) was a powerhouse of early Soviet literary and cultural theory. He was also one of the earliest Soviet film critics, and from the 1920s through the 1970s he worked as a screenwriter for Goskin (i.e., USSR State Committee for Cinematography). This collection of 16 essays examines all facets of Shklovsky’s legacy on literature, criticism, cinematography, and philosophy. Unlike most scholarship on Shklovsky, the present volume treats not only his best-known works—for example, Art as Device (1917) and Theory of Prose (1925)—but all his contributions and his influence into the late 1970s. The book’s three parts focus on Shklovsky’s three main areas of investigation: literature, the arts, and philosophy. Particular focus is placed on his legacy in the broad Soviet cultural landscape: on early cinema, on philosopher Yuri Tynyanov, on the Soviet intelligentsia, and on world literature. As one would expect, several essays explore the impact of Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization on other authors/works and contexts, from Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland to Cervantes’s Don Quixote. This is a book for specialists interested in expanding their knowledge of Shklovsky and his impact beyond his well-known work.Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.

• IntroductionIrina Evdokimova Part I: Shklovsky’s Heritage in Literature Chapter 1: Thinking in Images, Differently: Shklovsky, Yakubinsky, and the Power of EvidenceMichael Eskin Chapter 2: The Odyssey of Viktor Shklovsky: Life after FormalismBasil Lvoff Chapter 3: The Eternal Wonderer, or Who was Viktor Shklovsky?Slav N. Gratchev Chapter 4: Defamiliarization in translating Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland.Victor Fet and Michael EversonChapter 5: Viktor Shklovsky on NarrativeDavid Gorman Chapter 6: Defamiliarization and Genre: Semiotic Subversions in The Crying of Lot 49 and “Death and the Compass.”Melissa Garr Chapter 7: Shklovsky and Things, or Why Tolstoy’s Sofa should matter.Sergei Oushakine Chapter 8: The Motherland will Notice her Terrible Mistake:* Paradox of Futurism in Jasienski, Mayakovsky and ShklovskyNorbert Francis Chapter 9: Framing and Threading Non-Literary Discourse into the Structure of Cervantes´s Don Quixote IIRachel Schmidt Chapter 10: Shklovsky and World Literature. Grant Hamilton Chapter 11: Racism and Robots: Defamiliarizing Social Justice in Rosa Montero’s Tears in the Rain and the 21st Century.Steven Mills Part II: Shklovsky’s Heritage in ArtsChapter 12: Shklovsky’s Dog and Mulvey’s Pleasure: The Secret Life of Defamiliarization.Eric Naiman Chapter 13: Reading Viktor Shklovsky’s “Arts as Technique” in the Context of Early Cinema.Annie Van den Oever Part III: Shklovsky’s Heritage in Philosophy Chapter 14: Philosophical work of Russian formalism Alexander Markov Chapter 15: Shklovsky as a Technique: Literary Theory and the Biographical Strategies of a Soviet IntellectualIlya Kalinin Chapter 16: From a New Seeing to a New Acting: Viktor Shklovsky's Ostranenie and Analyses of Games and Play.Holger Pötzsch