Russian and American Poetry of Experiment: The Linguistic Avant-Garde (Avant-Garde Critical Studies, 34)

An experiment with language. Is it an object cultivated in poetic laboratories where entry is locked for mere mortals? And what do language scholars think about it? Specialists in language and literature studies interested in linguistic innovation and experimental poetry will find answers to these questions in Vladimir Feshchenko's book. The study investigates various strategies of radical linguistic creativity in Russian and American experimental writing of the 20th century and explores cases of contemporary ‘language-oriented'and ‘trans-language'poetry. It is a comparative examination of two national avant-garde cultures, but also a juxtaposition of the relationships that Russian and American avant-garde poetics had with linguistic ideas of their times. The monograph may serve as a wonderful introduction to the entire field of ‘linguistic poetics of the avant-garde'. Contents Aims, Scope and Acknowledgments Illustrations Intro: The Linguistic Twists and Turns of the Literary Avant-Garde 1 Linguistic Turn or Linguistic Turns? 2 The Return of Language at the Turn of the Century: Philosophy, Linguistics, Poetry 3 The Dizzying Mephisto Waltz of Experimentation 4 Language Experiment and Experimental Writing: from Whitman to the Russian Avant-Garde Part 1: Revolutions of the Word: From Symbolist to Late Avant-Garde Russian Poetry 1. Energeia, Not Ergon: Humboldtian Linguistics in Russian Poetry 1 Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Energeia: Poetic Speech as Activity 2 The Humboldtian Spirit-and-Letter in the Poetic Systems of Russian Symbolism and Futurism 2. Zvukoslovie: Verbal Magic as Poetic Action in Russian Symbolism 1 ‘The Magic of Language’ in the Poetics of Russian Symbolism 2 Glossolalia as a Special Case of Verbal Magic: Andrey Bely and the Poetry of Language 3. Futurist Glossolalias and Grapholalias 4. A Breakthrough into Languages: Velimir Khlebnikov’s Yazykovodstvo 1 Khlebnikov’s Language Experiment and Philosophy of Language 2 The Futurian as Linguae Constructor 5. Wassily Kandinsky and the Birth of the Languages of Art 1 Verse 2 Self-Commentaries to Paintings 3 Theory of Art Transition 1: Experiments with Time and Language: Alexander Vvedensky’s and Gertrude Stein’s Poetic 1 Alexander Vvedensky’s ‘Chinarian’ Language 2 Discontinuity of Time, Mind, and Language in Stein’s and Vvedensky’s Poetics 3 Repetition in Poetry: the Serial Grammar of Time 4 Verbs and Other Tense Forms: Tools of (Non-)Understanding Time Part 2: A Turn to Language in American Modernist and Avant-Garde Writing 6. Language Arts: the Early American Avant-Garde in Verbal Art 1 Ezra Pound: a Few Don’ts by a Language Innovator 2 Gertrude Stein: an Impelling Language 3 Language Arts of the American Dada 7. Poempictures: E. E. Cummings’ Performative Language 8. Heteroglossia and Hybridisation in E.E. Cummings’ Eimi: a Journey through Soviet Russia 1 Eimi or I Am: Travel Notes, Travelogue or Novel? 2 ‘Comrade K’ in the ‘Marxist Unworld’: Narrative – Composition – Characters – Motives 3 Linguistic Hybridisation in Eimi 4 Dystopia vs Factuality: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and E.E. Cummings’ Eimi 9. Revolution of Language and Eugene Jolas 1 Multilingualism, Polyglotism, and ‘Revolutionary Tendencies’ in Avant-Garde Literature 2 The ‘Revolution of Language’ According to Eugene Jolas 3 ‘Vertical Poetry’ as a ‘Revolutionary Approach to the Word’ 4 The Transatlantic ‘Universal Language’ 5 Origins of the ‘Universal Language’ Transition 2: Linguistics and Poetics: Roman Jakobson’s Opening and Closing Statements Part 3: Post-Modernism, Neo-Avant-Garde: Russian and American Poetries of Language after Wwii 10. From Babel to Babble: the New Russian Poetic Avant-Garde after the Loss of Speech 11. American and Russian Conceptualisms: How to Do Verse with Concepts 1 The Concept in Western Thought 2 Concept Art in America 3 The Concept in Russian Philosophy 4 Moscow Conceptualist Art and Poetry 5 Conceptual Analysis of Language in Russian Linguistics and Semiotics 12. Language Writing: American-Russian Poetic Transfers 13. Object-Oriented Languages: American Objectivism and Contemporary Russian Poetry 14. Poetry beyond Language Barriers: Contemporary ‘Trans-Language’ Writing in Russia and USA 1 Elizaveta Mnatsakanova’s Translingualism 2 Contemporary Russo-Anglophone ‘Trans-Language’ Writing Outro. Lab(-)oratory of the Logos Bibliography Index of Names Index of Terms