Mikhail Epstein

The Paradoxes of Innovation

On the Development of Literature in the l9th and 20th Centuries (in Russian)

Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel', l988, 4l6 pp.

Table of Contents

Preface

SECTION 1. THE CONTRADICTORINESS OF THE CLASSICS

  • The poetics of disharmony (Stendhal and Balzac)
  • Faust and Peter the Great on the seashore (Goethe and Pushkin)
  • Prince Myshkin and Akaky Bashmachkin: images of scribes (Gogol and Dostoevsky)

    SECTION 2. THE CHOICE OF TRADITION

  • The new in the classics (Derzhavin, Pushkin, Blok in contemporary perception)

  • A theme and a variation (the image of theater in Pushkin and Mandel'shtam)

  • Metamorphosis: On new currents in the poetry of 1980s

  • 1.The time of maturing
  • 2.The self-consciousness of culture
  • 3. On conceptualism
  • 4. On metarealism
  • 5. From metaphor to metabole
  • 6. The scale of poetic styles

    SECTION 3. THE PARADOXES OF INNOVATION

  • Criticism in conflict with creativity

  • 1.The paradoxes of "critical situation"
  • 2. Closer to the text - farther from literature
  • 3."Large" criticism and "small" literature
  • 4. Self-denial of criticism

  • Art in pursuit of nature ("Sexual revolution" in contemporary Western literature)

  • 1. The price of all-permissiveness
  • 2. Neo-paganism
  • 3. Proud mind and stupid beauty
  • 4. Illusion and nature

  • Between myth and reality: lessons of Latin American literature

    SECTION: IN THE SEARCH OF THE WHOLENESS

  • The principle of play in life and art

  • 1.Aesthetic and sociological conceptions of play
  • 2.Varieties of play
  • 3. Play and literature
  • 2. Play in drama and theater
  • 5. The systems of actor's play
  • 6. The playful and the serious

  • A thing and a word: on lyrical museum

  • 1. What is lyrical museum?
  • 2. Between storehouse and dump
  • 3. New memoriality
  • 4. The meaning of uniqueness
  • 5. Experiments in the description of things
  • 6. A thing as a word.

  • On the crossroads of image and concept: essayism in the culture of modernity

  • 1. Self-substantiation of individuality
  • 2. Integral literature
  • 3. Essay and myth
  • 4. Esseme and metaphor
  • 5. Essayization of literature and philosophy
  • 6. Essayism as a cultural phenomenon

    Conclusion. Notes on culture and contemporaneity Back to Mikhail Epstein Home Page

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