Estrangement and the somatics of literature : Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht

338 Pages·2008·1.49 MB·English

by  Brecht, Bertolt, Shklovskiĭ, Viktor, Tolstoy, Leo, Shklovskii, Viktor, Robinson, Douglas, Brecht, Bertolt, Tolstoy, Leo

Estrangement and the
Somatics of Literature
parallax              re-visions of culture   
                               and society
Stephen G. Nichols, Gerald Prince, and Wendy Steiner
series editors
Estrangement and the
Somatics of Literature
Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht
Douglas Robinson
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2008
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robinson, Douglas, 1954–
Estrangement and the somatics of literature : Tolstoy,
Shklovsky, Brecht / Douglas Robinson.
p. cm. — (Parallax, re-visions of culture and society)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8018-8796-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8018-8796-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Alienation (Social psychology) in literature. 2. Tolstoy,
Leo, graf, 1828–1910—Criticism and interpretation.
3. Shklovskii, Viktor Borisovich, 1893–1984—Criticism and
interpretation. 4. Brecht, Bertolt, 1898–1956—Criticism
and interpretation. 5. Criticism—Russia (Federation)—
History. 6. Criticism—German—History. I. Title.
pn56.a45r63 2008
809′.9333—dc22 2007033705
A catalog record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book.
For more information, please contact Special Sales at
410-516-6936 or [email protected].
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
one Zarazhenie: Tolstoy’s Infection Theory
1 Tolstoy’s Infection 3
The Disease 5 The Cure 13 Damasio’s
Somatic Theory 19
2 Tolstoy’s Estrangement 34
Estrangement Of/From 34 Tolstoy’s
Depersonalization 41 Disinfecting the Infection
Theory 62
two Ostranenie: Shklovsky’s Estrangement Theory
3 Shklovsky’s Modernist Poetics 79
The Capacity to Flow 82 The Four Things 89
Restoring Sensation to Life 95 Deautomatization 112
4 Shklovsky’s Hegelianism 133
Alienation 136 Work 140 Romantic Form 153
Alienated Labor 159
three Verfremdung: Brecht’s Estrangement Theory
5 Brecht’s Modernist Marxism 167
Shklovskyan Ostranenie and the Politicization of
Formalism 169 The German Tradition and the
Alienation of Alienation 178 Chinese Acting
and the Spatiotemporal Dialectic of Estrangement
196 Practical Work in the Theater: Empathy and
Estrangement 205 Brecht’s Infection Theory 218
Contents
Gestic Transformation 235 Conclusion:
The Somatics of Literature 251
Notes 259
Works Cited 293
Index 309
Acknowledgments
I wrote this book while on a Fulbright in Voronezh, Russia, where access to
the hard-copy Russian originals of Tolstoy, Shklovsky, and their Russian critics
and sources was easier than it might have been in the United States but every
other aspect of the research was more difficult. My first thanks go, therefore,
to Martha Swan, Lisa Harrison, and Anne Johnson in the Interlibrary Loan
office at the University of Mississippi, who obtained for me well over a hun-
dred chapters and articles. Kara Hobson in the Ole Miss English department
and my daughters Laura, Sara, and Anna, especially Laura in Finland, helped
me get the books I absolutely had to have. Thanks also to my colleagues at
Voronezh State University, especially Vyacheslav Borisovich Kashkin and Irina
Dobrynina, for helping me get into the university library there, to the consul-
tants at the Russian State Library (the Leninka) in Moscow, and to the Ful-
bright Program in the Russian Federation (Ed Rosloff, Valentina Gruzintseva,
and the others) for a productive year in the country of Tolstoy, Shklovsky, and
Il’inskaya, who gave me invaluable help with the other two.
Charles Rougle, my fellow Fulbrighter at Moscow State University that
year, read the Russian chapters not just for argumentative coherence but
for accuracy on Russian culture and language and Anna Karenina’s dreams;
thanks also to Svetlana Boym and Caryl Emerson for e-mailing their essays
in the then-forthcoming Poetics Today special issue on estrangement, guest
edited by Professor Boym, and for discussing my project with me. Aleksandr
Skidan, in the course of a long conversation in St. Petersburg on Brecht and
Shklovsky, got me to write a five-page essay on both for the newspaper he and
some friends were putting out, Chto delat’? / What is to be done? I ended up
deciding not to publish the piece there, but writing it kicked off the writing
of the book. Sasha also read some early drafts of chapter 3 and made helpful
comments. Thanks to Artyom Magun and David Riff for their comments on
the draft of the five-page essay. Michael Denner, editor of Tolstoy Studies Jour-
nal, in the course of accepting my article version of chapters 1 and 2 for pub-
vii
Acknowledgments
lication pointed me in some useful directions with Tolstoy and Shklovsky; the
two external evaluators to whom he sent that manuscript also offered helpful
suggestions. Timothy Sergay engaged me in a lively e-mail discussion of issues
of translation, Russian literature, and transliteration.
viii
Introduction
This book is in part a comparative study of Russian and German literary-the-
oretical history, specifically of a single strain of that history associated with the
concepts of estrangement and alienation (Befremdung, Entfremdung, Verfrem-
dung; ostranenie, otchuzhdenie) and formalist modernism, as well their roots
in German Romanticism, Hegel, and Marx. Due to the antithetical impulses
driving all of these movements, however, both estrangement and alienation
are from the beginning double, contradictory, dialectical: Friedrich von Schle-
gel’s Romantic irony as the familiar and the strange, as openness and disguise,
as serious and a joke; Hegel’s alienation (Entfremdung) as the externalization
(Entäußerung) of self and the internalization (Erinnerung or recollection) of
things as “I”; Marx’s materialism as saturated with the contradictory tensions
of Schlegelian Romanticism and Hegelian Idealism; Viktor Shklovsky and
Bertolt Brecht as Hegelian (Shklovsky) and Marxist-Hegelian (Brecht) formal-
ists interested specifically in the psychological impact of form on the phenom-
enological and/or intellectual (re)construction of a material world. As Stanley
Mitchell argues, the “meeting-point” between Shklovsky and Brecht is the
European avant-garde in the Weimar period, roughly from the Russian revo-
lution in 1917 to the fascist counterrevolution in 1933—a period during which
the cultural axis of artistic experimentation ran from Berlin (Brecht’s city) to
Moscow (Shklovsky’s). As the Stalinist Thermidor increasingly took over in the
Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s, formalism was branded “cos-
mopolitan” and banned; Shklovsky was subjected to enormous public pressure
to recant in the late 1920s, and even twenty and twenty-five years later, in the
newly formed German Democratic Republic (GDR), Brecht—given his own
theater in East Berlin and officially lionized—also remained somewhat under
a cloud as a formalist.
But that history is only one part of the book. Of at least equal importance is
the part of my main title that I haven’t yet discussed: the somatics of literature.
At its simplest and most conventionally salvific, the somatics of literature is
mapped out by Lev Tolstoy in his infection theory: literature infects its readers
ix