Viktor Shklovsky

My talk is devoted to the problem of literary and linguistic evolution in Roman Jakobson’s theory.

I start by putting his musings on the matter into context—that of comparative linguistics and literature, their primary and central question being, why and how does a language or literature change? The fact that a language or literature has different ages and ramifies with time, as Latin did into the Romance languages, made organic life an especially alluring analogy to some—and homology to others.

The difference between analogy and homology is key to understanding Jakobson’s take on literary development. Analogy betters our understanding of the patterns of language or literature but does not explain them. Homology, by contrast, is itself an explanation should we agree that language and literature abide by biological patterns (e.g. Darwin’s law of divergence).

The Russian Formalists, these founding fathers of contemporary literary scholarship, Jakobson among them, were no exception, “biologized” by the concept of evolution. In Shklovsky, for example, we will find multiple metaphors related to nature. Some of today’s scholars immediately “buy” them as homologies while others outright disregard them as analogies, in both cases prompted by the desire to stress Jakobson and his fellow Formalists’ proximity to, or aloofness from, biology-oriented Digital Humanists such as Franco Moretti or the so-called Adaptationists.

Meanwhile, instead of one Russian Formalism, I maintain, there were many, particularly distinguished by their interpretation of literature vis-à-vis nature; to prove it, I juxtapose Roman Jakobson, the Opoyaz Formalists (Yuri Tynianov, Viktor Shklovsky, and Boris Eikhenbaum), and Boris Yarkho. Only the latter did apply biological laws to literature, in an impeccably apodictic way. Conversely, early Jakobson and his allies from the Opoyaz resorted to nature not so willingly, and when they did, rather as an analogy, which, I hold, goes back to Alexander Veselovsky’s Historical Poetics, with its criticism of Ferdinand Brunetière and some other proponents of biologizing literary scholarship.

And yet Jakobson’s interest, later in his life, towards structural similarities between language and DNA complicates the matter. Was it mere curiosity or an example of methodological oscillations?

The controversies and discussions sparked by the Russian Formalists are important to review today because many of the same issues are still current. The most well-known exchange occurred in the early 1920s between Leon Trotsky and Victor Shklovsky, between a high government official of the Soviet regime and a leading member of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language. Was the discussion a harbinger of future Soviet policies? Interestingly, some of the objections voiced by government officials, at the time charged with overseeing cultural policy, are reflected in modern-day conceptions of Russian Formalism. An important question to consider is why a theory in poetics should have stirred the heated debate, about questions of ideology and art, in the first place.

At first, the Russian Formalists overlapped with Frankfurt School theoreticians, such as Horkheimer and Adorno, in criticizing the mechanization of life, clichéd art being one of its manifestations. Soon, however, the Formalists got interested in mass literature instead of rejecting it point blank. Rather than accuse it of all mortal sins, they recognized the necessary role it played in literary evolution. This made the Opoyaz Formalists (Shklovsky, Tynianov, and Eikhenbaum) one of the first scholars of the literary market, and the fact their theory thereof was not a Marxian one makes it doubly original. Furthermore, the Formalists remained faithful to their principle of studying something not only in abstraction but also in practice, as writers, which is the case with a novel Shklovsky co-authored, the devices of adventure fiction emulated and parodied in it. This shows that Formalists did take an interest in the sociology of literature despite their critics’ mistaken claims otherwise. However, Formalism still tried to approach sociological problems from the standpoint of literary theory proper, without conceding the autonomy of literature as a self-sufficient system. I rely on the Formalists’ texts to show how the idea of literature’s systemic independence can be elaborated and preserved when the largely sociological problem of the literary market is addressed.

Victor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist, coined and popularized the notion of defamiliarization: the creative distortion of the world of ordinary perception to renew the reader's diminished capacity for fresh perception. Estranging devices of the formalists and the general principles that inform defamiliarization are categorized in this article, and techniques of "making strange" and their function are identified in the gospels. Ostranenie is the creative deformation of an object or a linguistic and social convention so that the old and familiar appears new and unfamiliar. The Russian formalist, Victor Shklovsky, who coined and popularized the term ostranenie in the early twenties, argued that our perception of reality is habitual and automatic.

This thesis aims to identify the artistic devices and their relations on Shaun Tan's picturebooks which are directed to cause estrangement. Thus, by drawing theoretical and methodological relations with Literature and Art, we propose to expand research on the concept of estrangement within the field of Design, broadening its scope on the collaboration of discussions regarding artistic devices in general. Besides, it supports picturebooks studies by an aesthetic approach and conveying autonomy as a mode of pictorial and narrative experimentations for illustrators, artists and authors. To answer our research problem, on the first chapter, we aim to particularize the meaning of estrangement by establishing a genealogy of concepts and authors related to the cognitive phenomenon of estranging. Next, we delve into the main modern aesthetic currents and their concepts: alienation, the uncanny and ostranenie. Specifically, we look over Viktor Shklovsky's recent readings that emphasize the concept's ethical and political implications as opposed to prevailing structuralist readings up to the end of the 20th century. Then, we begin the second chapter by discussing the concept of medium and follow Russian Formalism's meaning in order to argue for the idea that picturebooks and comics are categories that operate according to the parameters of graphic narratives. Then, we establish the properties of the medium aiming to expound their devices on the analyses. On the third chapter, we present Shaun Tan in order to consider the ways that his works relate life and art. Through his artistic path, we understand the circumstances and personal motivations, and by exploring his pictorial techniques and his imagery, we visualize his aesthetic motivations that develop images that comprehend worldviews. At last, we analyze three picturebooks according to their relations between picture and text: The Red Tree (2001), The Arrival, (2006) and Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008). Underlying their specificities, Shaun Tan's picturebooks display devices of estrangement for they are able to realize the fantastic and estrange the mundane, allowing the reader to "trans-live" the experience through the poetic perception unlocked by the work of art.

Статья «посвящена докладу В. Шкловского «Речи Дон Кихота» в Московском Лингвистическом Кружке. До сих пор протокол заседания 15 февраля 1920 года, на котором состоялось это выступление, был известен не целиком и обрывался как раз на том месте, когда Шкловский брал слово. Недавняя находка полной копии протокола в архиве Р. Якобсона в Массачусетском политехническом институте (MIT) позволяет восстановить обстоятельства создания Шкловским его теории художественного сюжета. Как следует из этого протокола, Якобсон принял участие в утверждении этой «первой теории сюжетосложения», как он назвал работы и выступления своего друга тех лет (1918‒1921). Статью завершает комментированная публикация протокола заседания МЛК 15 февраля 1920 года.

From its first publication in 1923, Viktor Shklovsky's book Zoo, or Letters Not about Love has been discussed as a text that takes up a borderline position between literature and literary theory. The fact that the book was written and first published in Berlin ensured its place in studies of emigré literature concerned with geographic borders. In light of this twofold understanding of border as a boundary between genres and a category of literary cartographies, this article offers a rethinking of the notion of border in Shklovsky's early poetics. It suggests that the subject's geographic displacement (e.g., exile) provides a vantage point from which a reevaluation of established genres and discourses of textual production becomes possible. The experience of exile allows Shklovsky to challenge such categories as fiction (in literary and historical narratives) and nonfiction (both theory and autobiography). This becomes possible because in Zoo, or Letters Not about Love language is no longer presented as a medium of representation but rather as a means of recreating the writer's unstable literary and ideological position in postrevolutionary Russia and abroad. During his exile, which disrupted his contribution to the development of " the science of literature " undertaken by the formalist clique in Moscow and Petrograd, Shklovsky used writing as a way of constructing the Soviet writer's experience of emigré life. To further investigate the link between language and exile, the article draws parallels between Shklovsky's writings on the subject and Jacques Derrida's theories of writing, which link the inherent instability of language to its essential foreignness.

Повлиявшее на многих деятелей русского авангарда, В. Маяковского и Б. Хлебникова, П. Филонова и А. Платонова, учение Федорова уже в 1930-е годы перестало упоминаться и было вытеснено вместе с утопизмом ранней революционной культуры. Тем более, интересно открытое появление его имени и идей в работах вполне официального автора, каким был Виктор Шкловский с 1930-х годов и особенно начиная с эпохи Оттепели. Это еще более интересно потому, что в раннем творчестве Шкловского, укорененном в искусстве авангарда, имя Федорова полностью отсутствуют. Однако, в ретроспективе уже обнаруженного федоровского слоя отголоски русского космизма можно найти и в самых ранних работах Шкловского.

Having influenced many figures of the Russian avant-garde, including Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velemir Khlebnikov, Pavel Filonov and Andrey Platonov, by the early 1930s the teachings of Fedorov were suppressed, along with the utopianism of early revolutionary culture. It is all the more interesting to encounter the open evocation of his name and ideas in the work of a completely officially recognized author such as Viktor Shklovsky, who had assumed this status from the 1930s and who had emerged most forcefully at the center of cultural life in the era of the Thaw, when his roots in the avant-garde origins of Soviet culture endowed him with additional symbolic weight. Even more striking, one must note that in Shklovsky’s early works, that was enrooted in the avant-guard art, the name of Fedorov was completely absent. However, in perspective of already revealed Fedorovian stratum one may find the echo of Russian cosmism even in these early works.

The article analyzes the device of ostranenie (estrangement, defamiliarization) in art that was so important for Russian Formalism. Since the very beginning and up till now, ostranenie has caused numerous debates among literary theorists. Some rejected it entirely; others interpreted in too broadly and washed up the notion. The author of this article tries to defend ostranenie from both extremes and provides his own definition.

Статья посвящена приему остранения в искусстве, столь важному для русских формалистов. С самого начала и до сегодняшнего дня остранение вызывало споры среди теоретиков литературы. Одни отвергали его вовсе, другие толковали настолько широко, что понятие размывалось. Автор статьи пытается защитить остранение от двух крайностей и дает ему свое определение.

Se va a partir de la obra de Shklovski y de las idas y venidas del concepto de ostranenie, para luego establecer una comparativa entre éste y el término brechtiano de Verfremdung. Por último, se verá su aplicación en el teatro épico, un teatro comprometido con la realidad que debía esforzarse por alcanzar efectos sociales mediante este procedimiento, y cambiar la conciencia del espectador.

This chapter focuses on the two main objections leveled against realist mimesis by champions of modernism and the avant-garde (Russian formalism, the Anglo-American New Criticism). Modernism, It is argued, criticizes realism not so much for its purported lack of artistry but, on the one hand, for remaining  blind to existential alienation, and, on the other, for  disregarding the capacity of artistic form to act as an autonomous principle and a solace to alienation. Formalist approaches to realism, the chapter concludes, have no use for the referential prerogatives of this mode: at best, they reintegrate realist works within the canon of art, bracketing out realism's pretension to address social reality. This chapter takes into consideration the theoretical contribution of Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukacs, Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, I. A. Richards, Ian Watt, Philippe Hamon, Lilian Furst, and Toril Moi.

Dissertation on the photography work of artist Fernando Lemos between 1949 an 1952. Dissertation presented for the conclusion of an MA in Art History (Contemporary) at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa ( FCSH UNL). Advisors: Joana Cunha Leal and Margarida Acciaiuoli. In Portuguese.

Диссертация посвящена литературной критике Юрия Николаевича Тынянова (1894 – 1943), Виктора Борисовича Шкловского (1893 – 1984) и Бориса Михайловича Эйхенбаума (1886 – 1959) – трех знаменитых представителей формальной школы русского литературоведения, участников ОПОЯЗа (Общества изучения теории поэтического языка). В диссертации рассматриваются их собственно критические статьи, а также статьи метакритические – критика о критике. Эти статьи рассматриваются в контексте литературного процесса своего времени и в отношении к научной поэтике формалистов. В дополнение к самим текстам анализируются поведенческие установки формалистов-критиков. Проанализированы также те периодические издания, к выпуску или редакционной политике которых формалисты были причастны. В диссертации говорится о новаторском подходе формалистов к литературной критике – на практике и в теории – и о том вкладе, который они внесли в теорию журналистики.

The author of the term estrangement [ostranenie], Viktor Shklovsky argued that it is the essence of genuine art. A true work of art estranges the world, but it is also strange in relation to all other works previously produced. Estrangement in art withstands the automatization of both life and art forms.
In one way or another, we share this understanding when we praise a work for its originality or criticize it for being uninventive. While the criterion of estrangement seems quite effective and in line with today’s dynamic way of looking at art, paradoxes emerge when we try applying it to various texts.
Sometimes, for instance, we are no longer able to feel the originality of a thing that was such initially: its estrangement has itself become automated. And sometimes a writer did not even try to estrange anything and yet embedded estrangement in his/her text. An example of it is the epigraph to Nabokov’s Gift taken from a simple grammar book by P. Smirnovsky: “An oak is a tree. A rose is a flower. A deer is an animal. A sparrow is a bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable.” Can we talk of estrangement here? Certainly, and yet who is the author: Nabokov, who re-contextualizes these phrases, or Smirnovsky, who created the construction pregnant with estrangement? My presentation addresses this and other paradoxes the discussion of which does seem to have a great heuristic value.

This is a graduate school research paper examining Aldo Rossi's Gallaratese Housing in Milan through the lens of Viktor Shklovsky's idea of estrangement as written in his manifesto "Art as Technique". I argue that Aldo Rossi was using the technique of estrangement in order to create new readings of historical typologies. Rossi is often dismissed as a historicist but I believe his technique of estrangement is very projective and pragmatic.

ln what follows, I want to offer a different reading of the Formal method. I show that Formalists' contribution cannot be reduced to the attempt to reinstall the perceiving individual at the center of the literary analysis. Rather, the Formalists revolutionized literary scholarship by offering us a strikingly post-humanist and post-social picture of the world, in which things and humans are entangled in heterogeneous assemblages. Against the highly ideological environment, they insisted on paying a close attention to the material, basically offering us a non-Marxist version of historical materialism.

É com imensa satisfação que apresentamos ao nosso leitor a edição Nº 16 da RUS – Revista de Literatura e Cultura Russa. Neste número, além do material regular, oferecemos o Dossiê “Formalismo Russo”, organizado por Valteir Vaz. Dedicado a esta importante escola de crítica literária mundialmente conhecida, o dossiê reúne uma série de artigos, entrevistas, traduções e resenhas, que giram em torno de três eixos principais: história, teoria e análise

Russian Futurism surprised readers and writers alike during the years of social ferment leading up the 1917 Revolution. In particular, the participants in the movement themselves had no idea what events would have in store for them. Three among them, Bruno Jasienski, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Viktor Shklovsky, are representative of the literary upheaval, explosion of creativity, and of the difficult decisions writers came to face. Taken together for comparison, a study of their work also gives us a sense of the confusion of the time, how outcomes often seemed strangely arbitrary, and how events took unexpected turns. On another level, the route taken by each writer, nevertheless, is consistent with the overall direction of art and culture during the Soviet era. Paradoxically perhaps it was the writer who most directly challenged the assumptions of early Socialist Realism (more precisely its precursors) who survived to later reflect on the history. An interesting aspect of this history is the relationship between the Futurists and Russian Formalism. The discussion of their work will turn on three important historical studies that trace the course of the revolution (the broader context) and the course of parallel literary currents. *Final verse line from a poem written in 1937 by Bruno Jasienski in Butyrki prison prior to his trial and conviction.

Ostrannenie (‘making it strange’) has become one of the central concepts of modern artistic practice, ranging over movements including Dada, postmodernism, epic theatre, and science fiction, as well as our response to arts. Coined by the ‘Russian Formalist’ Viktor Shklovsky in 1917, ostrannenie has come to resonate deeply in Film Studies, where it entered into dialogue with the Brechtian concept of Verfremdung, the Freudian concept of the uncanny and Derrida's concept of différance.
Striking, provocative and incisive, the essays of the distinguished film scholars in this volume recall the range and depth of a concept that since 1917 changed the trajectory of theoretical inquiry.

European Film Studies – ‘The Key Debates is a new film series from Amsterdam University Press edited by Annie van den Oever (the founding editor), Ian Christie and Dominique Chateau. The editors’ ambition is to uncover and track the process of appropriation of critical terms in film theory in order to give the European film heritage the attention it deserves.

With contributions by Ian Christie, Yuri Tsivian, Dominique Chateau, Frank Kessler, Laurent Jullier, Miklós Kiss, Annie van den Oever, Emile Poppe, László Tarnay, Barend van Heusden, András Bálint Kovács, and Laura Mulvey, this important study is a wonderful piece of imaginative yet rigorous scholarship.

В книге анализируется связь теории и практики ОПОЯЗа, в первую очередь В. Шкловского, Ю. Тынянова и Б. Эйхенбаума, с наиболее радикальными— авангардными — эстетическими течениями первой четверти XX века. Это взаимодействие предопределило базовые установки формального метода: релятивизм ценностей, которые становятся таковыми лишь в рамках конкретной художественной системы; подход к литературе исключительно как эстетическому объекту; оценка произведения исходя из того, насколько оно способно задать новый вектор развития литературной системы. Литературно-критическая деятельность ОПОЯЗа рассматривается в контексте противостояния двух типов культуры: «горячей», поднимающей на щит новые художественные явления, нарушающие канон, и «холодной», стремящейся законсервировать унаследованную из прошлого систему ценностей.

The book of Maria Umnova focuses on the relationship between the theory and the practice of the Russian formalist school, especially its two most prominent figures, Juri Tynyanov, Boris Eichenbaum, and Viktor Shklovsky, with the most radical trends in the literary and aesthetic avant-garde in the first quarter of the XX century.
This interaction shaped the basic theoretical underpinnings of the formal method: (i) the relativity of the aesthetic value (which can only exist within a particular aesthetic system); (ii) understanding of literary works as aesthetic objects; (iii) the evaluation of а work according to its ability to advance the literary evolution.
Maria Umnova places the literary criticism by the members of OPOYAZ in the context of the confrontation between the two antagonistic “cultures”: the ‘hot’ culture that rejects canons and extols new artistic phenomena to high heaven, and the ‘cold’ culture that seeks to preserve the legacy inherited from the past.
The avant-garde nature of Russian formalism predetermined its death as a social phenomenon. The ‘hot’ culture of the 10s–20s was replaced by the ‘cold’ culture and the society of the 30s that focused not on creativity, but on reproducing stereotypes and cultural clichés; thus, a cultural polyphony gave way to the ‘authoritative’ style.

The article „Viktor Shklovsky in OPOIAZ and the Moscow Linguistic Circle (1919–1921)“ reconstructs the most important period in Viktor Shklovsky’s literary biography: the creation of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOIAZ) in 1919 in Petrograd, and his activities related to the Moscow Linguistic Circle. The authors present the evolution of Shklovsky’s ideas on poetics and film theory throughout this period against a historical background. They also describe his organizational skills in establishing OPOIAZ as a working association of literary scholars, and Shklovsky’s attempts in collaborating with his colleagues from the Moscow Linguistic Circle, namely Roman Jakobson, Osip Brik and Boris Tomashevsky.

Ruggero Vasari was a vital figure in the history of Futurism and played a key role in the movement’s relations with Central and Eastern Europe. The specific interplay between his artistic identity as an Italian Futurist on one hand and his predominantly European professional contacts and career on the other offers a symptomatic ensemble of elements that might help the historian when reassessing theoretical definitions of the avant-garde and its international modes of operation. This essay attempts to offer a more exacting explanation of what were the coordinates of Futurism at play
in these international settings and in Vasari’s work itself. In this sense, it analyses the international alliances which he established in the1920s with several artists and intellectuals in the German capital at the time, such as Ivan Puni, Karlis Zale, Viktor Shklovsky and Viking Eggeling. It retraces the way in which Vasari’s conception of radical art and his attitude of stylistic ecumenism succeeded in attracting to Futurism artists who, often as a result of their condition as political exiles, rejected the more overtly politicized tenets of Constructivism. It concludes by outlining the repercussions that this large avant-garde network had on the fate of Vasari’s own activity as a dramatist.

Humor and things related (such as the category of the merry [veselost’]), played an unusually prominent role in what is often considered the first school of contemporary literary theory, Russian Formalism, or, to be specific, its Petrograd wing, mainly represented by Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, and Boris Eikhenbaum. Humor helped these Formalists in their battle against approaching literature from the standpoint of “psychologism”. The comic let them emphasize literature’s own agenda (centered round the interplay of its constructive elements, not only within a single work but also across history), at the cost of the “serious” authorial purpose, previously identified with the meaning of the work. In fact, an artistic breakthrough, the Formalists maintained, tends to be (taken as) humorous at the beginning, its “serious” explanations being a later development;
accordingly, the Formalists considered as the prototype of all novels the parodic works of Cervantes
and Sterne. Humor advanced Formalist theory, helping it take its eyes off the tenor of the work and see
the vehicle, off content and see the medium, which now was considered the true message. However,
when it came to their special theory of the comic, this approach threatened to deconstruct the literary
significance of humor in literature, humorous works no longer distinguishable from non-humorous
ones. Why this was so is analyzed in the forthcoming second part of this article, titled “Literature as a
Joke”.

Второй том Собрания сочинений Виктора Шкловского состоит из автобиографических и мемуарных текстов, написанных с 1919-го по 1982 год. Его цель – попытаться представить многообразие и внутреннее единство биографических стратегий, благодаря которым стиль повествователя определял судьбу автора. Объединение в один том - классической и ранней автобиографической трилогии («Сентиментальное путешествие», «Zoo», «Третья фабрика»); очерковых воспоминаний об Отечественной войне, написанных и изданных еще до ее окончания; поздних мемуарных книг, возвращающихся к началу жизни и литературной карьеры; а также книги и устных воспоминаний о Владимире Маяковском, ставшим для Виктора Шкловского не только другом, но и особого рода экраном, на который он проецировал представления о времени и о себе, - позволяет совершенно иначе увидеть фигуру человека, начавшего писать воспоминания в возрасте 25 лет. Помимо того, что в этом томе впервые объединены ранние и поздние тексты, что дает возможность увидеть связь там, где прежде видели разрыв, в комментариях можно найти все дополнения и изменения, которыми обрастал роман «Zoo» на протяжении 50 лет прижизненных переизданий.

This paper proposes an analysis of Tom Stoppard’s play "Travesties" in light of the concept of estrangement, developed by the Russian literary scholar Viktor Shklovsky. The first section of the essay will describe the three dominant elements in Travesties: foreign/estranged language, intertextuality, and theatricality. The second section will consider the juxtaposition of historical and fictional events as a key factor for estrangement, and it will also examine the presence of a character-narrator on stage, and the relation this characters bears to the estranging factors already mentioned.

Key words: Tom Stoppard; Travesties; Viktor Shklovsky; James Joyce; Oscar Wilde; estrangement; intertextuality; theatricality.



En este ensayo se propone un análisis de la obra "Travesties", de Tom Stoppard, a partir del concepto de defamiliarización según fue desarrollado por el crítico literario ruso Viktor Sklovski. La primera sección del ensayo describe los tres elementos dominantes en Travesties: lenguaje foráneo/desautomatizado, intertextualidad y teatralidad. En la segunda sección se analiza la yuxtaposición de hechos históricos y ficticios como factor clave para la desautomatización, junto con la presencia del personaje-narrador en escena, y la relación que este personaje mantiene con los factores desautomatizadores ya mencionados.

Palabras clave: Tom Stoppard; Travesties; Viktor Sklovski; James Joyce; Oscar Wilde; desautomatización; intertextualidad; teatralidad.

В статье реконструированы обстоятельства первого выступления Шкловского в Московском лингвистическом кружке и восстановлена история отношений Шкловского с московскими формалистами (1919–1921). Доклад, текст которого не дошел до наших дней, был сделан 10 июня 1919 года. Он назывался «История романа» и вызвал в кружке бурную дискуссию о литературном сюжете. Основным оппонентом докладчика, судя по протоколу обсуждения, выступал Р. Якобсон, многолетний друг и соперник Шкловского. Завершает статью комментированная публикация протокола заседания МЛК от 10 июня 1919 года и записей Якобсона, сделанных во время обсуждения дебютного доклада Шкловского. Оба документа хранятся в архиве Института русского языка им. В. В. Виноградова (Москва).

In this article I intend to reflect upon the ways in which Andrei Tarkovsky has decided to represent "facts". I believe that for Tarkovsky this project involves questions about time and history in a way it does in few other contemporary artists. For Tarkovsky the approach of transforming facts into what is most commonly called "fiction" is based on sophisticated reflections upon the relationship between history and the present, and these reflections transcend, so I think, the playfulness of many classical "postmodern" approaches.

Abstract
This paper attempts a comparative study of the late nineteenth century CE Russian scholar Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of ostranenie or enstrangement, and the late tenth century CE Sanskrit scholar Rājānaka Kuntaka’s theory of vakrokti or indirect speech—both of which are broadly concerned with literariness or what differentiates literature from everyday speech. Much of Viktor Shklovsky’s discussions on enstrangement appear in his 1925 text Theory of Prose. The Sanskrit scholar Rājānaka Kuntaka’s theory of indirect speech, on the other hand, appears in his eleventh century CE text Vakrokti-jīvita (Vakrokti: The Essence of Poetry). The methodology adapted for this paper is the Variation approach of Comparative Literature developed recently by the Chinese comparatists, which insists on exploring similarities as well as emphasizing differences. As a study in the area of Comparative Poetics or the comparative study of theories and concepts across cultures, the broader objective of this paper is to weigh the possibility of cross-cultural influence between the theorists. The paper contends that comparative studies involving such non-canonical critical lenses are crucial to (a) enhance the visibility of various other/ed poetics across cultures, (b) expose and question the ideological bearings of the dominant theoretical traditions, and (c) explore the potential and adaptability of the little explored critical lenses for the contemporary readers.

Keywords: Comparative Poetics, Enstrangement (ostranenie), Indirect Speech (vakrokti), Viktor Shklovsky, Rājānaka Kuntaka, Variation Approach.

Il saggio, posto come introduzione al volume "Brevitas", affronta la distinzione tra forma lunga e forma breve cercando di integrare le scoperte neurofisiologiche con la riflessione della critica letteraria e con le nozioni di storia della letteratura dall'età classica all'estremo contemporaneo.

The Knight’s Move y Zoo, or letters not about love, de Víktor Shklovski, son libros signados por una proximidad temporal y una distancia espacial que trama entre ellos puentes y pasadizos. The Knight’s… es una recopilación de artículos publicados en el periódico petersburgués La vida del arte, entre 1919 y 1921. Zoo… se escribe durante el exilio del autor en Berlín y se publica en 1923. La deriva editorial de ambas obras es elocuente. The Knight’s… recibió escasa atención por parte de la crítica, debido principalmente a su demorada edición, varias décadas después de la muerte de Stalin.
Zoo…, más atractivo quizá por postularse como novela epistolar, fue reeditado y traducido, aunque sufriendo en ocasiones recortes y omisiones no inocentes. Contra el lugar común crítico de que, para el formalismo, el arte es absolutamente independiente del modo de vida social, aquí, por el contrario, parafraseando a Shklovski, lo que es de la vida, de lo novelezco y de la teoría literaria se confunden totalmente en una superposición que exaspera las categorías tranquilizadoras. La ‘crítica’ de los artículos no opera como un compartimento estanco opuesto a la ‘ficción’ de la novela epistolar, sino que entre ambas hay una interrelación tensa e incesante, donde la vida atravesada por los reveses de la historia opera como terreno común. En estas obras la teoría no surge como un metadiscurso que dice sobre la literatura, sino que ambas se entrecruzan en un juego de enredos, equivalencias y discordancias, en el que la escritura hace su propia crítica, y de la de la intersección entre escrituras e historias surge la teoría.

Lectura formalista de poemas de Tamara Kamenszain. A lo largo del trabajo, se retoman y desarrollan conceptos trascendentes para la teoría literaria tales como: "literaturidad"; rasgos de lo literario (según Eichenbaum); ficción; géneros literarios; "extrañamiento" (V. Shklovski), procedimientos de la lengua poética; sistema, norma, serie y valor; entre otros. También se elabora un listado de materiales sugeridos para retomar en posibles clases de Lengua y Literatura (especialmente, en Nivel Terciario), vinculados a diversos aspectos de la poética de Kamenszain y disponibles en formato digital. 
Por último, se diseña una propuesta de evaluación para 4º Año de Nivel Superior, en el área de Teoría Literaria IV: un trabajo práctico a realizar en un plazo aproximado de treinta días, acerca de los aportes teóricos abordados a través de todo este análisis.

El argentino Xul Solar (Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari), fue un escritor y pintor ligado a la vanguardia del Río de la Plata. Sobre el texto que nos ocupa de Solar, titulado Poema, sólo ha sido tratado tangencialmente a la luz de la vanguardia. El objetivo de este trabajo es hallar los procedimientos vanguardistas en el texto de Solar, que es un poema en prosa, y que deviene interesante junto con los autores que citamos. Y acerca de la vanguardia literaria argentina hay una bibliografía decente, para un buen entendimiento del texto.

Ora, como argumentarei no meu ensaio, o documentário do cineasta catalão perfila-se como uma apocatástase negativa: assim, e como veremos, a vida e o óbito sem inumação de Arthur Cravan,  não funcionam apenas como ‘tema’ de Cravan vs Cravan; são modelos de uma cinematografia com «um objectivo de ressurreição condenado ao fracasso», como formulou Isaki Lacuesta. Na poesia, no boxe, no cinema – formas de agir na tensão do fracasso – a negação da apocatástase retesa os corpos agentes, anima-os.

The article discusses the concepts of ostranenie (Shklovsky), V-effect (Brecht), and spect-actor (Boal), before critically reviewing their earlier application to analyses of games and play. Abstract The present article provides a critical introduction to concepts of estrangement. After referring scholarly debates about origins, mutual relations, and legacies of concepts such as Viktor Shklovsky's ostranenie, Bertolt Brecht's V-effect, and Augusto Boal's spect-actor, I critically review earlier applications of these concepts in game studies and point to some problematic aspects of these endeavors. Finally, I argue for the continued salience of these terms as tools for analysis of video games as designed objects embedded in complex socio-political and cultural contexts.

The advent of Malinowski's ethnographic theory is inscribed in a wider modernist environment, which set the ground for the emergence of new epistemological projects. Viktor Shklovsky's attempt to inaugurate a scientific study of literature was one of these. The article juxtaposes Shklovsky's early works ("Art as device" and Resurrecting the word), where he interprets the descriptive style of Lev Tolstoy, with Malinowski's experiments with storytelling and narrative technique (in Argonauts, but also in his letters to James Frazer). These two intellectual projects have common ancestors (folklore studies and comparativism), arose in the same modernist age, and came into contact again when, later on, structuralist theory redefined both linguistics and anthropology. The likeness between the respective scientific endeavors posits an immediate question: why is Russian formalism left out when anthropologists reconstruct their disciplinary kinship diagram? Not merely an attempt to spot non-Western European traces in the history of social anthropology, the paper considers Shklovsky's contribution to contemporary debates on ethno-graphic writing.