Series: Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society | Publication Date: March 26, 2008
Drawing together the estrangement theories of Viktor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht with Leo Tolstoy's theory of infection, Douglas Robinson studies the ways in which shared evaluative affect regulates both literary familiarity—convention and tradition—and modern strategies of alienation, depersonalization, and malaise.
This book begins with two assumptions, both taken from Tolstoy's late aesthetic treatise What Is Art? (1898): that there is a malaise in culture, and that literature's power to "infect" readers with the moral values of the author is a possible cure for this malaise. Exploring these ideas of estrangement within the contexts of earlier, contemporary, and later critical theory, Robinson argues that Shklovsky and Brecht follow Tolstoy in their efforts to fight depersonalization by imbuing readers with the transformative guidance of collectivized feeling. Robinson's somatic approach to literature offers a powerful alternative to depersonalizing structuralist and poststructuralist theorization without simply retreating into conservative rejection and reaction.
Both a comparative study of Russian and German literary-theoretical history and an insightful examination of the somatics of literature, this groundbreaking work provides a deeper understanding of how literature affects the reader and offers a new perspective on present-day problems in poststructuralist approaches to the human condition.
In his ground-breaking book, Douglas Robinson innovatively pulls together aesthetic theories by Leo Tolstoy, Viktor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht to establish a fascinating somatic paradigm of literature, which emphasizes instinctive empathetic reconstruction of fictional characters as part of reader response... One of the greatest achievements of Robinson's book is to bring humanity rigorously and explicitly back into literature on the basis of a highly up-to-date theoretical fremework, a reunion that has long been overdue.
(Natasha Grigorian Journal of European Studies )
Among the many virtues of Douglas Robinson's stunning new book is the fact that his three theorists, the world-class provocatuers Leo Tolstoy, Viktor Shklovsky, and Bertold Brecht, are also primary creators. They are at home in abstract systems, but each in his heart...
(Comparative Literature Studies )
Precise and impressive attention to scholarly detail.
(CLCWEB: Comparative Literature and Culture )
About the Author
Douglas Robinson is a professor of English at the University of Mississippi.
Product Details
Hardcover: 344 pages
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (March 26, 2008)
Douglas Robinson (b. 1954) was born in Lafayette, Indiana, and grew up in the LA and Seattle areas. After an exchange year in Finland in 1971-1972, he did two years of undergraduate work at Linfield College and the Evergreen State College, and then returned to Finland, taking three degrees and teaching full-time as "the American lecturer" in the English department at the University of Jyvaskyla before returning in 1981 to the US to do a doctorate in English at the University of Washington (Seattle). Upon completion of his Ph.D. in 1983, he accepted an assistant professorship in American Language and Literature at the University of Tampere, Finland, and was appointed to that post permanently in 1987; he then spent two years as an assistant professor of English-Finnish Translation Theory and Practice at the same university, before accepting a professorship in English at the University of Mississippi in 1989.
His dissertation, "American Apocalypses: The Image of the End of the World in American Literature," was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1985. His next book, written while teaching in the Translation Studies department at Tampere, was The Translator's Turn, which JHUP brought out in 1991. His next two books, Ring Lardner and the Other (OUP, 1992) and No Less a Man (Popular Press, 1994), were again in American Studies; but The Translator's Turn found its audience, and Robinson soon found himself invited around the world to give guest lectures and workshops on translation. Out of this pedagogical engagement with students and their teachers world-wide was born his textbook, Becoming a Translator: An Accelerated Course (Routledge, 1997, rev. ed. Becoming a Translator: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Translation, 2003). In the 1990s he also published Translation and Taboo (Northern Illinois UP, 1996), Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained (St. Jerome, 1997), his 270,000-word anthology Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche (St. Jerome, 1997), and What is Translation? Centrifugal Theories, Critical Interventions (Kent State UP, 1997). In 2001 appeared his last book exclusively devoted to translation: Who Translates? Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason (SUNY Press).
By the end of the 1990s he began to work in the field of linguistics, specifically in a branch of language theory or the philosophy of language that had never quite been dignified (or demeaned) with the rubric "linguistics," and published first Performative Linguistics: Speaking and Translating as Doing Things with Words (Routledge, 2003), then Introducing Performative Pragmatics (Routledge, 2006). His idea in these two books is that Austin's distinction between constative and performative may not work with UTTERANCES, but offers a useful classification of LINGUISTIC METHODOLOGIES, constative linguists being interested in "language" as abstract structure, performative linguists in language as fully embodied people doing things interactively with words.
After Introducing Performative Pragmatics was written, and before it was published, he embarked on new theoretical project: the development and dissemination of somatic theory. He had first theorized the somatics of language in a conference paper in 1985 (and indeed first theorized performative linguistics in a job talk in 1986), and first published on it in The Translator's Turn; but though somatic theory had figured passingly in his books of the 1990s, and two chapters were devoted to it in Performative Linguistics, he had never undertaken a book-length exfoliation of the theory. In 2004 he wrote The Somatics of Language (forthcoming from Rodopi); in 2005-2006, while on a Fulbright in Russia, he wrote Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008); in 2006-2007 he wrote Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture (under consideration at Rodopi); in 2007-2008, while directing the first-year writing program at the University of Mississippi, he wrote "First-Year Writing and the Somatic Exchange" (under consideration at Hampton Press); and in 2008-2009 he wrote "Aristotle and the Somatics of Rhetorical Life" (under consideration at the University of South Carolina Press).
