Bakhtin, Formalism, and Soviet Avant-Garde Aesthetics

This course examines the two approaches to literature, which in many respects changed the course of humanistic scholarship: Russian Formalism (1920s) focused on literary “devices” and “structures,” and credited by many for inventing “literary theory” as an autonomous scholarly discipline, and the theories developed by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and his circle of philosophers, poets, and literary critics, for whom the most important task of literary discourse was to create multiple, living personalities. The course discusses these theories in the context of Soviet and European modernist art and aesthetics of the 1920 and 30s. In English.