[PDF] Pelevin And Unfreedom eBook

Author : Sofya Khagi
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 434 pages
File Size : 39,86 MB
Release : 2020-12-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0810143046

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Sofya Khagi’s Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics is the first book-length English-language study of Victor Pelevin, one of the most significant and popular Russian authors of the post-Soviet era. The text explores Pelevin’s sustained Dostoevskian reflections on the philosophical question of freedom and his complex oeuvre and worldview, shaped by the idea that contemporary social conditions pervert that very notion. Khagi shows that Pelevin uses provocative and imaginative prose to model different systems of unfreedom, vividly illustrating how the present world deploys hyper-commodification and technological manipulation to promote human degradation and social deadlock. Rather than rehearse Cold War–era platitudes about totalitarianism, Pelevin holds up a mirror to show how social control (now covert, yet far more efficient) masquerades as freedom and how eagerly we accept, even welcome, control under the techno-consumer system. He reflects on how commonplace discursive markers of freedom (like the free market) are in fact misleading and disempowering. Under this comfortably self-occluding bondage, the subject loses all power of self-determination, free will, and ethical judgment. In his work, Pelevin highlights the unprecedented subversion of human society by the techno-consumer machine. Yet, Khagi argues, however circumscribed and ironically qualified, he holds onto the emancipatory potential of ethics and even an emancipatory humanism.

Author : Sofya Khagi
Publisher : Academic Studies PRess
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 38,65 MB
Release : 2022-01-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1644697785

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Companion to Victor Pelevin, a collaborative undertaking by a group of emerging Russianist scholars, focuses on the work of one of the most important and hotly debated post-Soviet writers. It provides a valuable resource to scholars, teachers, and students, including how best to teach Pelevin to university-level students, and which critical debates invite further investigation. The contributors offer new readings of Pelevin texts that cover a broad time span and pay due attention to the philosophical and aesthetic complexities of Pelevin’s oeuvre in its development from the early post-Soviet years to the second decade of the present millennium. Examining all of Pelevin’s major works and all Peleviniana currently available in English, the Companion aims to prompt further inquiry into this author’s intellectually stimulating and socially prescient work.

Author : Trevor Wilson
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 19,30 MB
Release : 2024-11-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0810147815

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Recounts Kojève’s key role in the pivotal exchange of ideas between Eastern and Western European intellectuals in the early twentieth century This book shines critical new light on the story of Alexandre Kojève’s intellectual origins and his role in the emigration of Russian philosophy into the West in the early twentieth century. Trevor Wilson illustrates how Kojève, at once adversarial to the insular communities of émigré philosophy and yet dependent on their networks and ideas for professional success, navigated the specters of the Russian tradition in pursuit of an autonomous self-definition as a philosopher and intellectual. Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy analyzes the philosopher’s complicated relationship to the interwar diaspora and the complex role played by the Russian tradition in his intellectual formation. Wilson examines Kojève’s early writings in the émigré press on Russian religious philosophy, Soviet politics, and Eurasianism and argues for their enduring relevance for understanding Kojève in his mature period. Crucially, he contextualizes Kojève’s famed seminars on Hegel and examines how Kojève’s thought became embedded in the politics of the Cold War. Based on newly transcribed and translated archival material, he highlights a previously unacknowledged, transnational exchange of ideas between Eastern and Western European intellectuals and shows how it played a pivotal role in twentieth-century intellectual history—and its legacy in the twenty-first.

Author : Marina F. Bykova
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 815 pages
File Size : 21,3 MB
Release : 2021-05-22
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 3030629821

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This volume is a comprehensive Handbook of Russian thought that provides an in-depth survey of major figures, currents, and developments in Russian intellectual history, spanning the period from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. Written by a group of distinguished scholars as well as some younger ones from Russia, Europe, the United States, and Canada, this Handbook reconstructs a vibrant picture of the intellectual and cultural life in Russia and the Soviet Union during the most buoyant period in the country's history. Contrary to the widespread view of Russian modernity as a product of intellectual borrowing and imitation, the essays collected in this volume reveal the creative spirit of Russian thought, which produced a range of original philosophical and social ideas, as well as great literature, art, and criticism. While rejecting reductive interpretations, the Handbook employs a unifying approach to its subject matter, presenting Russian thought in the context of the country's changing historical landscape. This Handbook will open up a new intellectual world to many readers and provide a secure base for its further exploration.

Author : Carol Apollonio Flath
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 34,49 MB
Release : 2009-01-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0810125323

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When Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaims that he is a "realist in a higher sense," it is because the facts are irrelevant to his truth. And it is in this spirit that Apollonio approaches Dostoevsky’s work, reading through the facts--the text--of his canonical novels for the deeper truth that they distort, mask, and, ultimately, disclose. This sort of reading against the grain is, Apollonio suggests, precisely what these works, with their emphasis on the hidden and the private and their narrative reliance on secrecy and slander, demand. In each work Apollonio focuses on one character or theme caught in the compromising, self-serving, or distorting narrative lens. Who, she asks, really exploits whom in Poor Folk? Does "White Nights" ever escape the dream state? What is actually lost--and what is won--in The Gambler? Is Svidrigailov, of such ill repute in Crime and Punishment, in fact an exemplar of generosity and truth? Who, in Demons, is truly demonic? Here we see how Dostoevsky has crafted his novels to help us see these distorting filters and develop the critical skills to resist their anaesthetic effect. Apollonio's readings show how Dostoevsky's paradoxes counter and usurp our comfortable assumptions about the way the world is and offer access to a deeper, immanent essence. His works gain power when we read beyond the primitive logic of external appearances and recognize the deeper life of the text.

Author : Sofya Khagi
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 22,60 MB
Release : 2013-08-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0810129205

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Silence and the Rest argues that throughout its entire history, Russian poetry can be read as an argument for "verbal skepticism," positing a long-running dialogue between poets, philosophers, and theorists central to the antiverbal strain of Russian culture.

Author : Anne Eakin Moss
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 398 pages
File Size : 14,38 MB
Release : 2019-11-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0810141043

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Only Among Women reveals how the idea of a community of women as a social sphere ostensibly free from the taint of money, sex, or self-interest originated in the classic Russian novel, fueled mystical notions of unity in turn-of-the-century modernism, and finally assumed a privileged place in Stalinist culture, especially cinema.

Author : Stanisław Lem
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 139 pages
File Size : 44,15 MB
Release : 1997-11-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 081011495X

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In The Lem Reader, Peter Swirski has assembled an in-depth and insightful collection of writings by and about, and interviews with, one of the most fascinating writers of the twentieth century.

Author : Gordana Crnković
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 44,12 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780810117181

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By conducting imagined dialogues between selected literary works - Eastern European on one hand, American and English on the other - this book proposes an effective way of reading literature, one that goes beyond the narrowing categories of contemporary critical trends.

Author : Julia Friedman
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 32,68 MB
Release : 2010
Category : Art
ISBN : 0810126176

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Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism sheds light on the oeuvre of Alexei Remizov (1877-1957), a great modernist eccentric who has remained largely unknown to Western audiences. Although his original prose garnered him early acclaim and has since entered the Russian literary canon, Remizov's artistic capacity was fully realized only after his experimentation with words and images culminated in a writing process that relies as much on drawing as it does on language. --