Overview

One of the founders of Russian Formalism, Viktor Shklovsky is a key figure within twentieth-century literary history. This book explores Shklovsky’s participation in early-Soviet debates about the relations between agency, volition and bodily functions. Viktor Shklovsky’s Involuntary Modernism shows how his writings engage with new ideas about the body, focusing on those physiological influences that were believed to affect human agency, such as nutrition and metabolism, energy preservation and kinaesthetic economy, reflexes and automatic actions, and hormones associated with reproduction and sexuality. Drawing on the work Shklovsky published during his exile in Berlin in 1922-1923, this book argues that his immersion in one of the major centres of modernist culture resulted in writing that responded to growing restrictions on freedom of movement by exploring the limits and possibilities of control over the body and its functions. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it uncovers a critical yet neglected area of early-Soviet literary and cultural history. Its in-depth exploration of the centrality of the body represents a new perspective on Shklovsky's work and offers an original contribution to current scholarship on Russian Formalism and its place in the larger context of modernist culture and literary theory.

Full Product Details

9781350422612

Table of Contents

Reviews

Quirky and original, Bulatova's book reinterprets Shklovsky's work of the 1920s by inscribing it in the larger field of Soviet discourses on biopolitics, registering both utopian visions of immortality and everyday physiological coercion. Shklovsky's prose, Bulatova compellingly argues, was part and parcel of this spirit of experimentation that sought -- and often failed -- to extend the realm of the possible. * Galin Tihanov, Queen Mary University of London, UK * Meticulously researched, eloquent, and original, Asiya Bulatova’s study reveals the complexity of Viktor Shklovsky’s thinking about corporeality – his acceptance of vulnerability, affirmation of individual needs, and insistence on creative defiance at a time when the Soviet ideology demanded discipline and obedience to the presumed laws of nature and socio-biological evolution. Grounded in close reading and thorough contextualization, this brilliant book is destined to become an inspiring resource for scholars of Formalism and the Early Soviet intellectual culture for years to come. * Ana Hedberg Olenina, author of Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Literature and Film * Bulatova takes a fresh look at Russia's most renowned formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky in light of early Soviet biopolitics, for which human bodies might be remolded and remade in the image of the Revolution. Her book makes a major contribution to new understanding of this extraordinary thinker and the culture he was working to create. * Tyrus Miller, Distinguished Professor of Art History and English, University of California, Irvine *

Quirky and original, Bulatova's book reinterprets Shklovsky's work of the 1920s by inscribing it in the larger field of Soviet discourses on biopolitics, registering both utopian visions of immortality and everyday physiological coercion. Shklovsky's prose, Bulatova compellingly argues, was part and parcel of this spirit of experimentation that sought -- and often failed -- to extend the realm of the possible. * Galin Tihanov, Queen Mary University of London, UK *

Author Information

Asiya Bulatova is a Researcher at Södertörn University, Sweden.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available