Suchergebnisse

In this article, Ilya Kliger describes the workings of "tragic realism" during the early to mid-1840s in Russia by engaging with the critical essays and letters of Vissarion Belinskii as well as with the first novels of Ivan Goncharov and Aleksandr Herzen. Kliger seeks to show that the concepts and forms produced by the authors standing at the inception of the realist tradition in Russia can be usefully seen as transpositions of the Hegelian theorization of modernity and of its privileged formal companion, theBildungsroman.Seen against the background of Hegel's post-tragic conception of contemporary "actuality," these authors can be understood as developing a historico-formal paradox, a vision of tragic realism. Tragic realism grasps contemporary life in terms of destructive and irreconcilable collisions and presupposes the broader historiographic vision of Russia's anachronistic position vis-à-vis the Hegelian vision of modern life.

Ilya Kliger addresses the question of Mikhail Bakhtin's intervention in modernist discourse by taking a step back from Bakhtin's views on modernist literature and outlining instead a more general Bakhtinian conception of the modernist condition as characterized by what Kliger calls "a crisis of authorship." The article focuses on Bakhtin's early work in narratological aesthetics and situates it within thelongue duréecontext of debates about the status of the subject of aesthetic experience and, more generally, of knowledge, debates that can provisionally be seen as originating at the end of the eighteenth century and coming to a head within the intellectual and creative milieu of twentieth-century modernism. Early Bakhtin helps us formulate a specifically modernist—by contrast with what will be called "transcendental" and "realist"—critique, a critique not limited to the field of literary analysis alone but applying to all forms of thinking that either presuppose abstract subject-object division or rely on modes of synthetic reconciliation.

In this article, Ilya Kliger and Nasser Zakariya treat Lev Tolstoi's conception of brotherhood from a narratological perspective. In the process, they trace the outlines of late Tolstoian narrative poetics, situating it within a variegated landscape of Tolstoi's own more properly "realist" literary practice, and offering broader suggestions on the workings of narrative in its capacity to model social relations and ethical action. A narratological focus here allows them to elucidate how stories take part in contemporary understandings of social influence, human connectedness, and alienation— not only on the level of themes but also, and more deeply, on the level of the narrative organization of events. Their main focus is on one of Tolstoi's late novellas "The Forged Coupon" and his last novel Resurrection.