Jim Curtis - Böcker

This book provides an in-depth analysis of Anton Chekhov’s four great plays within their cultural context: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard.The author explores how Chekhov’s historical situation as a non-aristocratic writer gave him an intense awareness of his relationship to the past. Chekhov had a very literary imagination and thus an essential feature of his work is the way he used intertextuality to incorporate and react to the work of his predecessors. Chekhov’s plays therefore lend themselves to analysis that uses Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence. Applying these principles make it possible to give coherence to Chekhov’s. The anxiety of influence was a pervasive factor in Chekhov’s evolution, and explains why Chekhov used intertextuality more frequently, and to greater effect, than any of his contemporaries. Close study of Chekhov’s four great plays shows that they have a hitherto unrecognized stylistic alternation. ‘Chekhov the Anxious Playwright’ makes extensive use of recent Russian scholarship (including dissertations) on Chekhov and synthesizes it with Western scholarship to produce a general understanding of his plays in their cultural context. It will be the first major book that brings together both a wide range of scholarship and as well as literary theory to analyze Chekhov’s plays.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre history and Russian literature.

In Stalin’s Soviet Monastery Russian scholar Jim Curtis integrates innovative work in linguistics, anthropology, and media theory to develop a holistic analysis of Russian society that includes a theoretically based rationale for ignoring ideology in favor of cultural dynamics. While the young Iosif Djugashvili, later known as Joseph Stalin, was studying to be a priest in an Orthodox seminary, he took on the role that defined his political career, that of a sadistic elder who imposed fiendish vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on hapless Soviet citizens. As an exercise in historical anthropology, Stalin’s Soviet Monastery emphasizes the role of myth and ritual in Russia, a society with strong residual orality. The imitation of Christ is called passion-suffering, a practice that helps to explain the widespread acquiescence to Stalin’s practices. Stalin was intensely interested in literature, and his favorite author was Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Some passages in Dostoyevsky’s work anticipate key features of Stalinism. An Afterword discusses the development of Russian society after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In Stalin’s Soviet Monastery Russian scholar Jim Curtis integrates innovative work in linguistics, anthropology, and media theory to develop a holistic analysis of Russian society that includes a theoretically based rationale for ignoring ideology in favor of cultural dynamics. While the young Iosif Djugashvili, later known as Joseph Stalin, was studying to be a priest in an Orthodox seminary, he took on the role that defined his political career, that of a sadistic elder who imposed fiendish vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on hapless Soviet citizens. As an exercise in historical anthropology, Stalin’s Soviet Monastery emphasizes the role of myth and ritual in Russia, a society with strong residual orality. The imitation of Christ is called passion-suffering, a practice that helps to explain the widespread acquiescence to Stalin’s practices. Stalin was intensely interested in literature, and his favorite author was Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Some passages in Dostoyevsky’s work anticipate key features of Stalinism. An Afterword discusses the development of Russian society after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

This innovative book presents some fundamentally new interpretations of the best-known and best-loved classics of Russian literature. It does so by applying to them the latest Western research on creativity and literary theory. Readers will come away from the book with an enhanced understanding of individual works by classic authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as well as of the overall evolution of nineteenth-century Russian literature.

Taking readers behind Bob Dylan's familiar image as the enigmatic rebel of the 1960s, this book reveals a different view--that of a careful craftsman and student of the art of songwriting. Drawing on revelations from Dylan's memoir Chronicles and a variety of other sources, the author arrives at a radically new interpretation of his body of work, which revolutionized American music and won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Dylan's songs are viewed as collages, ingeniously combining themes and images from American popular culture and European high culture.