Alex's dissertation explores ways in which poetic utterances actually do speak against the received idea of poetry as an atemporal and unearthly genre and subtly present their own social and economic agendas. He read the canonical and non-canonical texts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian poetry with an eye for uncovering the economic and social dynamics of these texts, unveiling their intricate and complicated relations to issues of censorship, copyright, professionalization of literature and the literary market, fashion, marital conventions and practices, the...
Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street, Plimpton Room #133
“Post-Dissident Studies: Between Collaboration and Dissent in Central Europe” conference, with keynote by Jonathan Bolton (Harvard University, Slavic Department) and Julia Hell (University of Michigan, German Department), Barker Center, 12 Quincy St., Plimpton Room #133, September 20, 9:00 a.m. – September 22, 6:00 p.m.
Co-Sponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, the Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities, and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. For...
In this presentation, Alexandre Gontchar examines how Andrei Platonov’s stylistic experiments in his novel The Foundation Pit (1930) expose some inherent contradictions in how dialectical materialism conceives of the human.