A Plurilingual Analysis of Four Russian-American Autobiographies: Cournos, Nabokov, Berberova, Shteyngart
Among the many examples of Russian-American émigré literature, a number of less known authors moved to the USA, following their predecessors’ transnational and plurilingual experiences. The bilingual (and sometimes trilingual) expressions in their works written in English invite a contrastive analysis of their transition from their source language, Russian, to their target language, English. This book explores the linguistic structure of the autobiographies of four Russian-American writers (Cournos, Nabokov, Berberova and Shteyngart) bringing into focus the linguistic „geology“ of their texts, as they record their passage from a Russian world to an English one. These linguistic passages are examined from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, by dwelling on the geographies of the émigrés’ itineraries as well as on the process of linguistic transformation that such itineraries generated. By analyzing these writers’ geographic and linguistic routes, this volume engages the reader in a metalinguistic discourse and highlights the influence of these first plurilingual experiments on modern theories concerning linguistic globalization.
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In search of Russian modernism
The writing and teaching of Russian literary and cultural history have changed little since the 1980s. In Search of Russian Modernism challenges the basic premises of Russian modernist studies, removing the aura of certainty surrounding the analytical tools at our disposal and suggesting audacious alternatives to the conventional ways of thinking and speaking about Russian and transnational modernism.
Drawing on methodological breakthroughs in Anglo-American new modernist studies, Leonid Livak explores Russian and transnational modernism as a story of a self-identified and self-conscious interpretive community that bestows a range of meanings on human experience. Livak’s approach opens modernist studies to integrative and interdisciplinary analysis, including the extension of scholarly inquiry beyond traditional artistic media in order to account for modernism’s socioeconomic and institutional history.
Writing with a student audience in mind, Livak presents Russian modernism as a minority culture coexisting with other cultural formations while addressing thorny issues that regularly come up when discussing modernist artifacts. Aiming to open an overdue debate about the academic fields of Russian and transnational modernist studies, this book is also intended for an audience of scholars in comparative literary and cultural studies, specialists in Russian and transnational modernism, and researchers engaged with European cultural historiography.
Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures by the Modern Language Association
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