One Hundred Years of Ostranenie
December 15-17th 2016, University of Erfurt, Germany
Organizers: Prof. Holt Meyer and Dr. Alexandra Berlina, University of Erfurt
Contact: [email protected]; [email protected]
A century ago, in 1916, a young student named Viktor Shklovsky gave a talk entitled “Art as
Device”. In it, he coined a term which became crucial in literary studies, and important in the
study of cinema and visual art: ostranenie. Also known as “defamiliarization”, “estrangement”,
“enstrangement”, “making strange” and “foregrounding”, ostranenie is about rendering the usual
extraordinary and thus making the reader (or viewer) perceive it anew. Or is it? The way
Shklovsky uses the term in “Art as Device” is ambiguous enough; if we also consider his later
and lesser-known works as well as the scholarly legacy of ostranenie, we arrive at an array of
meanings worthy of a fundamental investigation, thus our suggestion to make this subject the
topic of a conference.
A hundred years of ostranenie has not been a hundred years of solitude for the concept. It has
been commented on and developed in countless ways, in monographs and in whole special issues
of scholarly periodicals. Tracing these paths is tracing the history of modern literary theory itself.
The OPOYAZ – the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, which formed in Petrograd
around Shklovsky – also celebrates its centennial in 2016. The work of its members influenced
structuralism, but tracing a straight line from Russian formalism to structuralism is a misleading
simplification. Reader-response criticism and cognitive poetics arguably owe as much to
formalism as does structuralism. As regards literary heritage, some writers – such as Yuri Olesha
and Bertolt Brecht – were directly influenced by the concept of ostranenie, and many others
exhibit a wealth of ostranenie in their work which remains to be discussed. The conference is
international and interdisciplinary; scholars beyond Slavic and literary departments are expressly
invited. Ostranenie features in diverse literatures, and in other cultural products than literary
fiction – comic strips, films, paintings… The heritage of ostranenie in art and scholarship, as
well as its fate in Shklovsky’s later works, is the conference’s key focus.
Welcome!
Please find a detailed programme with abstracts and profiles below.
15.12, Thursday
All events take place at the University of Erfurt, “Großer Senatssaal”, MG1/10
10.00-11.30 Keynote: Ostranenie (Verfremdung) vs. alienation (Entfremdung): a case of
conceptual confusion
Aage Hansen-Löve, University of Munich (Germany).
Chair: Holt Meyer, University of Erfurt
The talk: In every serious study of modern aesthetics, esp. of the historic avant-garde, the
concept of "making strange" (Verfremdung, ostranenie) is a central issue as a device in the arts
and literature or as a leading precept of aesthetics of defamiliarization or deautomatization. In
this function the principle of "making strange" realizes the type of "negative aesthetics" (Russian
formalism, Adorno) figuring the opposite pole of "positive aesthetics" or "aesthetics of
affirmation".
Since Romanticism and in the tradition of mannerist aesthetics the concept of "enstrangement"
(Entfremdung, otčuždenie) figures as a manifestation of the isolated and autonomous genius in
arts and other fields of culture. In this case, we also see the positive understanding of an
originally negative concept (strangeness, otherness). In this negative understanding the concept
of "enstrangement" (Entfremdung) plays a central role in the sociological and ideological
theories of the early Marx in connection with the ideas on self and other in the philosophy of
Hegel. For Marx, the automatization of working processes and lifestyle of the proletariat leads to
a psychic and existential state of deprivation of the self and in the consequence to a false
consciousness (falsches Bewußtsein) of the working people. This type of enstrangement is the
opposite of the effects of "making strange" that are leading to a dynamisation of perception and
cognition processes. As a consequence the isolating and blunting effect of enstrangement is
transformed in a much more vital and also political conscious mode of life and thinking.
In this sense the equalization or identification of ostranenie and otčuždenie leads to a
fundamental misreading of artistic as well as social or ideological conditions. Very often we
encounter the confusion of both concepts or the false absolutization of one of them. This results
in very often naive understanding of artistic and/or social processes and structures.
The talker: Aage A. Hansen-Löve, studied Slavonic Studies and Byzantinistics in Vienna. Dr.
phil 1977 with a monograph on Russian Formalism (Der russische Formalismus, Wien 1978,
Moscow 2001). Venia in Russian Literature in Vienna with a monograph in Russian Symbolism
(Der russische Symbolismus, Vienna, 3 vols., 1999/2003, 1014). Since 1978 Prof. at the Ludwig
Maximilian Universität, Munich. Emeritus since 2013. He lives in Vienna and has published
studies on problems of intermediality, literature and myth (Mythopoetics), psychoanalysis and
literature, typology of Russian modernism, the philosophical writings of Kasimir Maleivch (Gott
ist nicht gestürzt!, München 2005), the Russian avantgarde (Am Nullpunkt, Frankfurt/M.
Suhrkamp 2005), Russian Neoprimitivism (Über das Vorgestern ins Übermorgen, München
2016) and on Intemedialityin Russian Modernism (Moscow, 2016). Founder and editor of the
journal Wiener Slawistischer Almanach (since 1978). Member of the Austrian Academy of
Sciences since 1999.
12.00-13.30 Plenary 1:
Ostranenie, the Alien and the Thing
Chair: Neil Stewart, University of Bonn (Germany)
-"Schleiermacher's das Gefühl des Fremden as Shklovsky's Feeling of the Strange' and
'Feeling of the Alien." Douglas Robinson, Hong Kong Baptist University (China)
The talk: It is well known in Shklovsky studies that the theory of estrangement comes down to
Shklovsky and other modernists from the German Romantics, especially perhaps Novalis, whom
Shklovsky quoted as an important source many decades later. It is perhaps less well known that
Friedrich Schleiermacher, in his 1813 address to the Royal Society of the Sciences in Berlin,
spoke of the importance of leaving a Gefühl des fremden "Feeling of the Foreign" in a
translation--and that his theory of "foreignization" parallels Shklovsky's theory of ostranenie
"estrangement" in interesting ways: (1) Shklovsky provides both a methodology and a rationale
for estrangement that is only vaguely hinted at in Schleiermacher, and (2) the fact that Shklovsky
hinted strongly at the influence of zaum poetry on his theory of estrangement suggests that the
two thinkers' models might be fused in a three-step move from foreignization (Schleiermacher)
through estrangement (Shklovsky on Tolstoy) to alienation (Shklovsky on Khlebnikov and
Kruchyonykh). Alienation (otchuzhdenie in Russian) has often been taken as a synonym of
estrangement (ostranenie/Verfremdung); this model would suggest that it is a more extreme form
of it.
The talker: Douglas Robinson is Chair Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University
and author of 20 monographs, including Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy,
Shklovsky, Brecht (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008).
- Shklovsky and Things, or Why Tolstoy’s Sofa Should Matter. Serguei Oushakine, Princeton
University (US)
The talk: In the essay that made him famous, Shklovsky introduces the concept of estrangement
through a close reading of a passage from Tolstoy. Usually, Shklovsky's scholars focus on the
dynamic of memory and perception that this passage suggests (“I couldn’t recall whether I had
already dusted it off or not…”), interpreting estrangement as a mechanism that helps the
individual to replace his/her dull and passive recognition with an active sensation. What is often
gets neglected in this human-centered reading of estrangement is the role of objects, the function
of things, the significance of matter. I want to correct this oversight by tracing the life of things
in Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement. I am interested in the “knowledge of a thing” that he
points to in his Art as Device but never develops directly. I argue that by taking seriously the
agentive qualities of things that Shkovsky discusses in many of his texts, we could depsychologize estrangement. Or, to put it more metaphorically, by re-examining the place of
Tolstoy’s sofa in Shklovsky’s concept, we could estrange the concept of estrangement itself. In
order to take it back from the automatized perception.
The talker: Serguei Oushakine teaches anthropology and Russian and Soviet cultures at
Princeton University. Among his recent projects is a three-volume collection “The Formal
Method: an Anthology of Russian Modernism” (Formal’nyi metod: antologiia russkogo
modernisma. Moscow-Ekaterinburg: Kabinetnyi uchenyi) that brings together key texts of
leading theoreticians and practitioners of the formal method: from Alexei Gan, Osip Brik and
Vsevolod Meyerhold to Viktor Shklovsky, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Sergei Eisenstein.
Lunch break
15.00-16.30 Plenary 2 – Ostranenie: Reception and
Fictionalization
Chair: Douglas Robinson, Hong Kong Baptist University (China)
- Shklovsky's Key Concepts in Roman(novel)ized Time and Space. Chris GoGwilt, Fordham
University (US)
The talk: This talk will explore the relevance of three of Shklovsky's most celebrated and
influential concepts: the priyom, or device; ostranenie, or e(n)strangement; and the story/plot
(fabula/syuzhet) distinction. Considering these as key concepts in the formation of twentiethcentury literary theory, the talk will pay special attention to the way these untranslatable Russian
terms are transliterated, transcribed, and translated into keywords of anglo-american theory. Each
of these concepts prove useful in posing a hitherto understudied theoretical problem: the spacing
and timing of romanization.
The talker: Chris GoGwilt is the author of The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of
Modernism in Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya (Oxford, 2011) which won the Modernist Studies
Association book prize for 2012. He is also the author of The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages
of Culture from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock (Stanford, 2000) and The Invention of the
West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford, 1995). He has
published numerous essays in the areas of Victorian studies, modernism, colonialism, and postcolonialism as book-chapters and in such journals as Victorian Studies, The Yale Journal of
Criticism, Comparative Literature Studies, Conradiana, Cultural Critique, Modernism/
modernity, Mosaic, New German Critique and PMLA.
- The Next Step of ostranenie in its Fictionalization of the 1920s and the Embedding of this
Step in Shklovskii’s “Friend and Encounter” Writing of the 1940s and 1960s Holt Meyer,
University of Erfurt (Germany)
The talk: One can view Shklovskii’s Berlin semi-fictions and para-fictions of the 1920s,
particularly the “Zoo” novel, as a step beyond ostranenie or a next step of ostranenie after the
classic formulations of the 1910s. After discussing the meaning, plausibility and repercussions of
each of these two interpretations (including the question of whether there is really a difference
between the two), I will assess the embedding of the “Zoo” novel in memoir works of the 1960s
(the book versions Zhili byli, published in 1964 and 1966) in the context of the Shklovskii’s
framings of ostranenie in its survival of Stalinism (terror and war). i.e. in the first 50 years of its
existence. From the 1960s I will be looking back to the 1940s, also a time in which some of the
memoir texts of the 1960s originated and were first published.
The talker: Holt Meyer is holds the Chair of Slavic Literatures at the University of Erfurt. He is
the author of the monograph Romantic Orientation (Slavistische Beiträge, 1995) and a broad
range of studies on the history of theory in the 20th century.
17.00-18.30 Plenary 3 - Ostranenie in English
Chair: Basil Lvoff, City University of New York (US) and Moscow State University (Russia)
- War Made Strange in Anglophone Fiction. Alexandra Berlina, University of Erfurt
The talk: The best-known sentence of Shklovsky’s long scholarly career is “Automatization eats
things, clothes, furniture, your wife and the fear of war” – and yet the connections between
ostranenie and war, as well as violence in general, have hardly been mentioned in a hundred
years. In literature, language can be made strange and thus experienced more intensely (similar
ideas are to be found in Aristoteles). Looking at the familiar as if it was new can help science
(such ideas were voiced by Hume and Schlegel, and natural philosophers before them). Making
the usual strange can render neglected beauty beautiful (the Romantics were all about this). What
Shklovsky seems to be the first critic to observe is the way art can transform habitual violence in
order to show its horrors. He dreaded the drying up of feeling with which the human psyche can
react to atrocities. After discussing the importance of making strange violence in Shklovsky’s
theoretical work, the talk will proceed to contemplate literary examples.
The talker: Alexandra Berlina, a post-doc in literary studies at the University of Erfurt, is the
author of Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in Self-Translation (2014, Anna Balakian Prize
2016) and the editor-translator of Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader (2016).
- Challenging the ordinary: ostranenie in British literature. Alexandra Borisenko, Moscow
State University (Russia)
The talk: The British are famous for their fascination with all things weird, unusual and
eccentric. De-automatizing perception of things and texts is one of the favourite devices of the
British literature, be it an idiom, a Biblical quotation or everyday life routine. Lewis Carroll was
one of the pioneers of this literary practice; we find different kinds of ostranenie in Charles
Dickens, Dorothy Sayers, and even in Harry Potter books. This literary device can present a
problem for translation into different languages, where both concepts of “strange” and
“ordinary” may differ from the source culture.
The talker: Alexandra Borisenko is Associate Professor at the Department of Discourse and
Communication Studies, Faculty of Philology, Moscow State University (Lomonosov).
Graduated from Moscow State University s.c.l. in 1992. PhD (2000) on “Soviet translation
school”. Since 1997 has taught (jointly with Dr. Victor Sonkin) a workshop on literary
translation at the Department of Philology of Moscow State University. The workshop has
published several books translated by her students, including two major anthologies of British
and American crime fiction (2009, 2011). Teaches courses in translation studies, children’s
literature, crime fiction, cultural studies. Author of numerous critical and theoretical works on
literary history and literary translation. Literary translator, technical translator and conference
interpreter, member of the Literary Translators Guild. Contact: [email protected]
16.12, Friday
All events take place at the Collegium Maius, Michaelisstraße 39, Erfurt.
10.00-11.30, section 1) Veiled and Unveiled Ostranenie in
(Soviet) Russia
Chair: Elena Fratto, Princeton University (US)
- Shklovsky, Ostranenie, and the Writers’ Union. Carol Any, Trinity College, Hartford (US)
The talk: After officially moving beyond Formalism with his "Monument to a Scholarly Error"
(1930), Shklovsky served on the presidium of the newly created Writers' Union from 1934
through the post-war years. In closed meetings of the presidium, he functioned as a leader of
whatever opposition could be mustered among his fellow-writers in the room . This oppositional
stance was a real-life iteration of ostranenie. If in Opoyaz, ostranenie pointed to the ability of
literary language to strip away conventional perceptions, in the Stalin years ostranenie was about
using the language of daily communication, бытовой язык, to upend the conventions of literary
policy, and to de-automatize the literary clichés of socialist realism. In effect, ostranenie
emigrated from literature to life. Using archival transcripts of such meetings, this paper examines
Shklovsky's interactions with writers including Pil’niak and Platonov, as well as with officials
who oversaw the Writers' Union, including the writer Aleksandr Fadeev and the party ideologues
Aleksandr Shcherbakov and Dmitrii Polikarpov. It also provides evidence as to the influential
mark left by ostranenie and other Opoiaz concepts in the decades following Formalism’s public
disgracing.
The talker: Carol Any received her Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures from the
University of Chicago in 1982. Since 1984 she has taught Russian literature, language, and
culture at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut (USA). She is the author of Boris
Eikhenbaum: Voices of a Russian Formalist (Stanford University Press, 1994), as well as articles
on the theory and politics of literature. She is currently completing a book on the Writers' Union
in the Stalin years. In addition to her scholarly interests in between art and political culture,
problems of literary interpretation, and ethics in literature. All of these issues come into play in
her book in progress, a study of the interaction between writers and political authorities in
Stalin’s Soviet Union.
- Russian Formalism and the Revolution. Ilya Kalinin, St.-Petersburg State University
(Russia)
The talk: The theoretical and revolutionary project, which was announced by Shklovsky, aimed
at much further than to renew the philological knowledge, or even the arts as such. Moreover, in
its focus on ordinary things, Russian Formalism did not exhaust itself either with the tendency
towards “total aestheticization” of everyday life. And he conceives of the “new artistic forms”,
which are deemed capable to “bring back the experience of the world to the man, resurrect the
things and kill the pessimism”, as the means of reviving the lost sensibility towards the material
aspect of the world. This way, “the resurrection of words” calls for the resurrection of things.
The deautomatising function of art endows art with revolutionary potential: from the Avantguard’s point of view the art must deny not only artistic tradition, but tradition as such. Art
revolutionarises tradition, breaks up its ritual repetitiveness. Art is a revolution with a human
face; during bourgeois peacetime, art performs a permanent revolution, while at the time of the
revolution, it textually fastens together the disintegrating fabric of everyday life.
The paradoxical specificity of Shklovsky’s case is in that he attempted to balance between the
position of someone who creates a new descriptive language and someone who is the agent of
the poetic language which the former is to describe. Shklovsky did not only articulate the already
appropriated experience of the revolution, but also anticipated that experience. He experienced
the revolution as a clash with the force capable of capturing, of powerful catching this
constituted for literature impulse to defamiliarise the habitual context of perception. If, in the
space of literature the mechanism of estrangement lays bare and revitalizes an obsolete artistic
devices, then in the space of history and biography estrangement manifests itself through a
certain existential shock, excess, which cuts off the regime of the ordinary, thereby performing a
deautomatizing collapse and creating a radical defamiliarisation.
The talker: Ilya Kalinin is an Associate Professor at Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences
(http://artesliberales.spbu.ru), St.-Petersburg State University. His researches focus on early
Soviet Russia intellectual and cultural history and on the historical politics of contemporary
Russia as well. He is editor-in-chief of the Moscow-based intellectual journal “Emergency
Rations: Debates on Politics and Culture (Neprikosnovennyj Zapas/NZ: Debaty o politike i
culture)”, and has published in a wide range of journals including Ab Imperio, Baltic Worlds,
Sign Systems Studies, Social Sciences, Russian Literature, Russian Studies, Russian Studies in
Literature, Slavonica, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, New Literary Observer, etc. His book
“History as Art of Articulation. Russian Formalists and Revolution” is recently published in New
Literary Observer Publishing House.
- Ostranenie and the Heritage of Formalism in the (Soviet) Russian Teaching of Literature.
Boris Lanin, Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg, Greifswald (Germany)
The talk: Ostranenie as a concept played a decisive role in the history of teaching literature at
Soviet and post-Soviet secondary school. Interestingly enough, it has never been mentioned in
the textbooks or in the teachers’ manuals but influenced the whole system of literary education.
It became an implicit motto of school analysis. Though official education cursed ‘the formalism’
as the heresy that confronted ‘marxist methodology’ many forlamists’ tools and methods were
widely in use. In the 20s their representative was I. P. Plotnikov. M.I. Rybnikova, and later M.G.
Kachurin, G.I. Belen’kii and G.G. Granik developed that line in the secondary school textbooks.
All of them inserted ideological rhetorical figures but widely used ostranenie though never
mentioned it. So, the mechanism of phenomena survived and still influences school literature as
a discipline. Finely, our group at the Academy of Education of Russia used the formalists’ legacy
while creating our set of the textbooks.
The talker: Boris Lanin was born in Baku, USSR (Azerbaijan). He served as visiting professor
at Stanford, Hokkaido, Central European, Kobe, Waseda (Tokyo), Saitama Universities, at the
Institute for Advanced Studies in Paris, Woodrow Wilson International Center (Washington,
DC). His current position - Head of literature and Professor at Academy of Education of Russia.
Prof. Lanin’s textbooks for 5-11 grades are widely used in more than 50 regions of Russia.
10.00-11.30, section 2) Close Readings
Chair: Willie Van Peer, University of Munich (Germany)
- Constructing text with Šklovskij: the strolling narration by Michal Ajvaz (czech) as
unfolding. Nora Schmidt, University of Erfurt (Germany)
The talk: The short novella Zénonový paradoxy by the Czech author Michal Ajvaz can be read
as a constructed narrative that connects Šklovskijs concepts of interlacing and unfolding. The
very principle of the novella which depicts itself as treatment of the paradoxa of the ancient
philosopher (in more than one aspect), transfers the first concept into the second and thereby
enables a new perception of the text as text. As the plot/fabula provokes through a fantastic
dimension of the narratedand the prolonged representation a wondering and renewed perception
(both last mentioned aspects are central to Šklovskijs notion of e(n)stragement/ostranenie) , my
lecture shows how the novella’s sjužet allows a new view of Šklovskijs
‘unfolding/razviortyvanie’, an e(n)stragement/ostranenie of ostranenie itself.
The talker: After having studied philosophy and Western Slavic literatures in Erfurt, Leipzig
and Prague, Nora Schmidt now works as a researcher and lecturer assistant at the Department for
Slavic Literary Studies at the University of Erfurt. In 2016 she finished her doctoral dissertation
on flânerie in Czech literature. Nora Schmidt’s research interests especially focus on Czech and
Polish literatures since the 19th century as well as literary theory. She published several articles
on Miloš Urban and Michal Ajvaz.
- Marks of Distinction: Quotation and Ostranenie in the Work of Vladimir Maiakovskii.
James Rann, University of Oxford (UK)
The talk: In this paper I will apply the concept of ostranenie to one of Shklovsky’s initial
inspirations, the poetry of Vladimir Maiakovskii. In particular, I will examine the way in which, in
the 1920s especially, Maiakovskii makes systematic use of quotations from other authors. By
analysing this phenomenon in relation to the work of other Futurists. I will show how,
estranged from their context, these quotations are not intended to prompt a fresh
understanding of the original, but rather to demonstrate the potential for transformation
hidden within emblems of pre-revolutionary literature, and, as such, to act as emblems of
Maiakovskii’s wider programme for the building of a new Soviet culture.
The talker: Dr James Rann is Teaching Fellow in Russian at the University of Birmingham. He has
previously taught at the University of Oxford, Queen Mary University of London and University
College London, where he completed his PhD, on Russian Futurism, in 2013. In addition to his
research interests, which primarily focus on the Russian avant-garde, he works as a literary
translator and writes on contemporary Russian culture for a general audience.
- Rhetoric and Ostranenie. Breaking up Chiasmus in von Kleist’s „Improbable Truths“
Thomas Glaser, University of Erfurt (Germany)
The talk: Rhetoric not only (as persuasion) aims at the ways of representing things as
convincing or natural, but (as a system of tropes) it exhibits the artificial character of the ways of
representation. So Rhetoric “allows for two incompatible, mutually self-destructive points of
view, and therefore puts an insurmountable obstacle in the way of any reading or understanding.”
(De Man 1979) Rhetoric therefore can be considered as a scene of “ostranenie”.
My paper focusses rhetoric as a scene of “ostranenie” in reading Heinrich von Kleist‘s
“Unwahrscheinliche Wahrhaftigkeiten”, a text responding to Aristoteles‘ differentiation of
history, as dealing with something that really happened, and of literature, as dealing with
something that could happen (Arist., Poetic 1451b). In telling a true but improbable event, that
occurs when a bulwark explodes, Kleist’s Text displays the (only modern) figure of chiasmus as
a means of evidence and plausibility in Schiller’s theoretical writings. In reconstructing and
shifting slightly a notice in Schillers “Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande” (“The
History of the Secession of the United Netherlands”) as chiastic, Kleist’s text exposes Schillers
use of the chiasmus as means of persuasion and, beyond that, the chiasmus as an arbitrary
constellation, working in the philosophical texts of Schiller.
The talker: Thomas Glaser studied German Literature, History and Philosophy at the
Universities of Munich (LMU) and Tübingen. He worked as an assistant director at the
Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe and as a wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the
Württembergisches Landesmuseum Stuttgart. He did his PhD at the University of Erfurt on the
problem of aesthetic communication in the works of Kant, Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel and
Novalis. He was postdoctoral research fellow at the Forum: TZM at the University of Erfurt. At
Leuphana University Lüneburg he held a professorial chair of Rhetoric with Anselm Haverkamp.
At present he works as a wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in the departement of Neuere Deutsche
Literaturwissenschaft at the University of Erfurt. His areas of research are literature and culture
of Romanticism, Theory of Education, Rhetoric and Aesthetic. His current research project deals
with the rhetoric of aesthetic education.
12.00-13.30, section 1) Philosophy and Empiricism
Chair: Simon Spiegel, University of Zurich (Switzerland)
- Husserl and Shklovsky on Aesthetic Experience Anna Yampolskaya, Russian State
University for the Humanities, Moscow (Russia)
The talk: In his letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal Husserl claims that aesthetic and
phenomenological experiences are similar; in the perception of the work of art, we concentrate
on how the things appear to us, instead of what they are. The work of art “forces us into” the
aesthetic attitude in the same way as the phenomenological ἐποχή drives us into the
phenomenological one. I will investigate further this parallelism between aesthetic experience
and the practice of phenomenology, using Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of ostranenie.
Ostranenie is an artistic device or technique that breaks the routinized forms of perception: in
aesthetic experience we are able to see thing as new and not just “recognize” it automatically,
because we experience, we feel the form – in an affective, sensible and even sensuous way. Also
phenomenological reduction can also be described as a philosophical technique that aims to
arrest the “ready-made”, “taken for granted”, “pre-given” meaning in order to access to a new
meaning which is not yet sedimented or even stabilized. The old meanings are not necessarily
rejected, but they are not taken for granted any more.
Aesthetical ἐποχή produce new meanings, because the constant play of contradictory feelings
and associations make my pre-understanding of the object somewhat “wobbly”: thus we gain a
kind of a 3D-vision of meaning in its becoming. I argue that Russian formalism and
phenomenology are both trying to express the same idea although using different conceptual
languages: the heart of aesthetic experience is the constitution of a new meaning as a meaningin-formation, driven by the intertwinement of our affective and reflective involvement with a
work of art.
The talker: Anna Yampolskaya is a Professor in the Philosophy Departement of the Russian
State University for the Humanities, Moscow. Her principal research interests are in
phenomenological philosophy, German and French phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Fink,
Lévinas, Marion, Henry, Richir, Maldiney, Koyré, Derrida), and beyond (philosophical
conversion; radical transformations of subjectivity in philosophy, religion and psychoanalysis;
speech acts theory). Among her recent publications are a monograph on Levinas (French
Embassy prize for the best book on France in Russian 2012) and a monograph on
phenomenological method (2013). She has also edited a phenomenological reader in Russian
(2014) that includes commentated translations of Levinas, Marion, Henry, Merleau-Ponty and
other contemporary philosopher
- Enstrangement Revisited: From Shklovsky’s Epistemology to Deleuze’s Ontology, Ridvan
Askin, University of Basel (Switzerland)
The talk: The function of art is to give us back the richness of concrete things that we lose with
the abstractions of pure thought: Shklovsky’s account with its insistence on sensation is to the
point. However, it remains strictly epistemological, merely concerning our access to things. I
propose an ontological extension of Shklovsky’s account. This can be achieved if we understand
sensation in its Deleuzian sense, as an autonomous mode of being. Works of art would then be
veritable “beings of sensation” expressive of being as such. The recourse to Deleuze is not
arbitrary: like Shklovsky, Deleuze opposes sensation to recognition and posits the “fundamental
encounter” before any use of cognition—we encounter things aisthetically before we start
processing them cognitively. As with Shklovsky, this process remains mostly unconscious: only
art is able to make us aware of it.
But in Deleuze’s metaphysical framework, the object of encounter is the very sensation of the
“beings of sensation” referred to above. Deleuzian sensations are “beings whose validity lies in
themselves” as they “exist in the absence of man.” To put it simply: sensations constitute the
basic fabric of reality. Following this vein, art no longer merely discloses things to us. Rather, it
pulls us out of ourselves and immerses us in sensation, the very fabric of reality. By the same
token, enstrangement no longer denotes an epistemological process but an ontological state:
through art, we become wholly other.
The talker: Ridvan Askin is Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in American and
General Literatures at the University of Basel. He is co-editor of Literature, Ethics, Morality:
American Studies Perspectives (2015) and Aesthetics in the 21st Century, a special issue of
Speculations (2014). His first book, Narrative and Becoming, is forthcoming from Edinburgh
University Press. Currently, he is working on his second book tentatively titled Transcendental
Poetics and the Futures of American Romanticism.
- What we have learned about Ostranenie over the past 30 years, Willie Van Peer, University
of Munich (Germany)
The talk: The present conference presents a plethora of interpretations and applications of
Shklovsky’s ostranenie notion. But is the basis of the notion truthful? This paper attempt to do
something totally different from most approaches. It asks what gains in knowledge have been
made since 1916. Those gains come relatively late (in the 1980s), but they are both revealing and
inspiring. On the one hand, a series of controlled experiments have unequivocally demonstrated
that there is a real (psychological) basis to Shklovsky’s claims about the nature and function of
art. Simultaneously, empirical researchers have been able to differentiate between different kinds
of ostranenie, but also to lay bare some unforeseen effects on readers.
The paper will present the most obvious tendencies in this body of research, which is, however,
still sadly unknown to mainstream literary scholars.
The talker: Willie van Peer got his Ph.D. from Lancaster University (G-B), and is Professor of
Literary Studies at the University of Munich; former President of IGEL (International
Association for the Empirical Study of Literature) and former Chair of PALA (Poetics and
Linguistics Association). He has been Visiting Scholar in the Departments of Comparative
Literature at Stanford and at Princeton University, and in the Program of Cognitive Psychology
at the University of Memphis. He is also a Fellow of Clare Hall of Cambridge University. He is
the author of several books and articles on poetics and the epistemological foundations of literary
studies. His publication Stylistics and Psychology. Investigations of Foregrounding (London:
Croom Helm, 1986) marks the beginning of the empirical study of ‘ostranenie’. He is also the
founding General Editor of the journal Scientific Study of Literature. Together with his wife he
has co-founded the development Project Mali-ka-di (see www.malikadi.org) in a remote village
in Mali.
- The Concepts of Sign and Medium in Russian Formalism. Patrick Flack, Charles University
Prague (Czech Republic)
The talk: “Mediality” is an already polysemic term that can be used to refer to the reality created
by media, the ways and means of mediation, or the fundamental fact that access to history and
reality is always conditioned by media. A common attribute of all these definitions is to focus on
the mediating function of media, on its status as an “in-between”. As such, these definitions are
also grounded in a traditional conception of semiotics which defines a sign above all through its
referential function as a “something standing for something” (aliquid stat pro aliquo). My
argument here will be to suggest that Russian Formalism, starting from the fundamental notion
of ostranenie, offers a completely new conception of the sign as an expressive value in itself.
This in turn leads to a new understanding of mediality not in terms of the necessary mediated
nature of reality or the in-between function of media, but as the structured, crystallised and
“expressive” medium of our intentional experience itself. Although this dimension of Russian
Formalism was not taken up in French structuralism or mainstream literary theory, it has found
echoes in a number of traditions such as phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty), enactive psychology
(Varela & Maturana), bio-semiotics (Kull), radical constructivism (Schmidt) and structural
ontology (Rombach).
The talker: Patrick Flack is a post-doc researcher at the Central-European Institute of
Philosophy, Charles University, Prague and the managing director of sdvig press. He specialises
in Philosophy of Language and Intellectual History, with a particular focus on Central and
Eastern Europe and a background in literary theory, phenomenology, semiotics and the history of
linguistics.
12.00-13.30, section 2) Psychological and Psycholinguistic
Approaches
Chair: Atsushi Tajima, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Japan)
- Psychological studies on familiarity and cognate affective states (unfamiliarity, novelty,
strangeness, etc.): from Waitz to Lipps (c. 1850-1910) David Romand, CNRS-Université Paris
(France)
The talk: For several years, a growing number of studies has emphasized role of the 19th-century
psychological tradition in the making of the key concepts of Russian formalism. Highlighting
this genealogical link seems particularly relevant in the case of ostranenie. Basically, the concept
ostranenie refers to the capacity of an artwork to induce special feelings, such as “unfamiliarity”
or “eeriness”, which are endowed with a definite epistemic and aesthetic value. This idea was,
per se, hardly new in the 1910s, and, as a matter of fact, ostranenie-like feelings had been
extensively investigated by psychologists and aestheticians since the mid-19th century. Firstly, I
will discuss the pioneering figure of Theodor Waitz (1821-1864), who was instrumental in
analyzing the role of the feeling of expectation (Gefühl der Erwartung) and other epistemic
feelings, such as surprise, satisfaction, novelty, deception, or trouble, in conscious life.
Interestingly, Waitz was probably the first psychologist who tried to understand the
manifestation of such affective states in the experience of music and visual arts. Harald Høffding
(1843-1931) is another key figure of my talk. I will discuss his developments on the “quality of
familiarity” (Bekanntheitsqualität), the mental property by which means, according to him, one
recognizes one's own contents of consciousness as having been experienced before. In the late
19th and the early 20th centuries, familiarity and related affective states, such as “novelty”,
“strangeness”, “amazement”, “eeriness”, or “uneasiness”, generated considerable interest among
psychologists, especially in Germany, but also in Austria, Britain, USA, and France. Here, I
would like to make a special mention of Theodor Lipps (1851-1914), who was probably the
subtlest analyst of these feelings and of their functional relationships, both in his general
psychology and his psychological aesthetics. A substantial part of my talk will be devoted to the
role played by ostranenie-related feelings in psychological aesthetics, as it developed between
about 1850 and 1910. My hypothesis is that German-speaking studies on psychological
aesthetics and aesthetic feelings, which were widely read in the Russian context, constituted the
direct source of inspiration of Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie.
The talker: David Romand is a researcher in history of knowledge, epistemology, aesthetics,
and philosophy of mind. He is a specialist of German psychology (late 18th-early 20th centuries),
of which he studies the theoretical aspects and the conceptual connection with other disciplines,
such as philosophy, linguistics, and aesthetics. One of his other specialties is the history of
psychological aesthetics (c. 1850-1910), notably the question of aesthetic feelings. More
generally speaking, he is a historian and epistemologist of affective sciences: besides aesthetic
feelings, I am interested in past and current studies on “affective epistemology”. In collaboration
with Sergueï Tchougounnikov, he wrote several articles on the German psychological sources of
Russian formalism. Recently, he has also investigated the issue of formalist aesthetics in its
broader European context.
- “Standing, Walking, Buttoning…”: Automatization, Mental Economy and Disruption in
James and Shklovsky. Robert Schade, University of Potsdam (Germany)
The talk: In the theory of Viktor Shklovsky two main principles constitute the literary device of
ostranenie: 1) the principle of the non-economic character of art, 2) the de-automatization of
daily perception. The talk is going to reconstruct those two principles against the background of
one of the most important works of psychology of the period: William James’ “Principles of
Psychology” (1890). James’ notion of the habit of human thinking and perception might stand
exemplarily for Shklovsky’s notion of automatization: „actions originally prompted by conscious
intelligence may grow so automatic by dint of habit as to be apparently unconsciously
performed. Standing, walking, buttoning and unbuttoning […] may be done when the mind is
absorbed in other things“. According to James, these kinds of habitual actions are indispensable
parts of repetitive tasks. Through their physical and mental mechanism of recognition, habits are
able to reduce the effort of muscular as well as neurological energies. The theory of the
American pragmatist philosopher stands under the primacy of intelligent and efficient forms of
labour. The possibility of an alternative means of perception according to James might be
thinkable through changing the way we see things, for example viewing a landscape upside
down. According to Shklovsky on the other hand, art can be thought of as a perpetual inhibition
and a redirection of usual ways of thinking and perception, a genuine serpentine path.
The talker: Dr. des Robert Schade, PhD in Comparative Literature, University of Potsdam.
Former stipendiary at the research training group “Sichtbarkeit und Sichtbarmachung”. Research
topic: “Sehen – Schwanken – Anders-Sehen. Zur Geschichte einer Ästhetik des Schwankens und
seiner Aktualisierung in Literatur und Malerei (1870-1925)”. Specialist in Russian Formalism
and the works of Viktor Shklovsky. At the moment without affiliation. Contact:
[email protected]
- A New Syntactic Definition of Emotion within „Aesthetic Formalism“: The Case of
Ostranenie? Serge Tchougounnikov, S.T., University Bourgogne, University Franche-Comté
(France)
The talk: The proposed talk compares the notion of “emotion” (Gefühl) within two formalist
movements of the late 19th and early 20th century Europe, namely the German/Austrian
(Zimmermann, Hanslick, Riegl, Hildebrand, Fiedler) and the Russian (Jakobson, Eichenbaum,
Schklowski, Tynjanow) formalism. It turns out that both traditions replace the concept of a
“simple emotion” - also understod as “spontaneous” and “natural” one - with the new concept of
“composed”, or purely “relational", emotion, conceived as a kind of “mental syntax”. This new
vision of “emotion” as a specific rhetorical organisation replaces a traditional psychological
notion of „mental state“, or “mental disposition” ("Stimmung"). Indeed, both formalisms treat
emotion as a “non-subjective”, “kinetic”, "syntactic" phenomenon located on the surface of
aesthetic objects. The formalist definition of emotion (Gefühl) seems to go back to the mentalist
European psychology of the 19th (J. Herbart, R. Lotze, W. Wundt, Th. Lipps, etc) where it had
been derived from the relational and differential character of interaction between constitutive
elements of aesthetic objects. Being dependent on the concepts of “construction” and of “sens of
movement” (Bewegungsgefühl), this formalist "emotion" is closely related to the psycholinguistical phenomenon of so-called “verbal gesture” ("Sprachgebärde") as well as to the
formalist notion of “ostranenie”.
The talker: Dr. hab. Serge Tchougounnikov, Senior lecturer (Maître de conférences),
Department of French linguistics (University of Bourgogne, Dijon) and Department of Russian
studies (University of Franche-Compté, Besançon). Habilitation Theses: From Psychologism to
Cognitivism: psychological linguistics between Germany and Russia (1850-1920). Towards the
history of psychologication of European humanities (University Paris-7, 2012). Two monographs
and numerous articles dealing with history and epistemology of European humanities in their
relationship with European psychology (19th-20th centuries). Co-organiser of three International
Congresses on the Russian Formalism (Paris, 2009, 2009, 2012) and of numerous workshops on
related subjects (Dijon, Paris, from 2005 until 2016).
- From the Economy of Perception to the Rationalization of Nutrition: Automatization in
the Time of Famine, Asiya Bulatova, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
The talk: In Shklovsky’s famous phrase “Automatization eats things, clothes, furniture, your
wife and the fear of war,” habitual perception of the surrounding world threatens to consume –
literally eat – everything one encounters in everyday life. By making the usual strange,
Shklovsky’s estrangement promises to override “the law of economy of mental effort” by
making perception “long and laborious.” In this talk I suggest that the concept of automatization
acquired a different meaning in Shklovsky’s writings published in Berlin in 1923, which outline
the dire living conditions the new proletarian state was facing after the revolution. Throughout
these writings Shklovsky persistently describes how scientists, writers and artists continued to
work in freezing houses, universities, laboratories, studios and theatres in conditions of a severe
food crisis. At the same time the concept of automatization appears to undergo a process of
metamorphosis. Although it may “eat” the objects we perceive, which now pass before us as if
they were “prepackaged,” automatization can also be a useful survival mechanism when one has
to live on a meager daily ration and various “dietary surrogates,” which require a lot of
intellectual gymnastics to be recognized as food. In a 1924 article, Soviet physician and
psychologist, Aron Zalkind wrote that new students were added to the mass of sickly,
malnourished, nervously worn out individuals prone to suicide. The reason for such a dangerous
dynamic was “collective enthusiasm and famine.” Drawing on Pavlov’s research on automatism
and reflexes, Zalkind maintained that the excitement of the new society led to unmanaged fatigue
which, coupled with the lack of appropriate nutrition, had undone helpful automatic responses
and reflexes evolutionally developed by humans to preserve energy. In focusing on the tendency
to present human subjects in terms of energy consumption and output, I aim to place Shklovsky’s
concept of automatization in the broader context of the growing interest in the effects of
malnutrition on the mental capacities of individuals and their physiological makeups.
The talker: Asya Bulatova received a PhD degree at the University of Manchester’s English and
American Studies Department, where she also taught various courses on modernist literature and
critical theory. I held research fellowships at the New Europe College and Queen Mary,
University of London. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Nanyang
Technological University (Singapore) where she is writing a monograph on Russian Formalism,
human agency and the institutionalization of literary studies. She has published in Comparative
Critical Studies and Poetics Today.
Lunch break
15.00-16.30, section 1) Reception
Chair: Anke Hennig, University of the Arts, London (UK)
- Shklovsky and Koneski: Ostranenie in Macedonian scholarship and the Future of Poetry.
Ivan Dodovski, University American College, Skopje (Macedonia)
The talk: In Macedonian scholarship, Shklovsky’s ostranenie has been translated as
ochuduvanje. This concept, along with the theoretical corpus of Russian Formalism, has seen a
profound reception in the work of the most renowned Macedonian linguist and poet, Blazhe
Koneski (1921-1993). Both in his studies, such as A Grammar of the Macedonian Literary
Language (1952, 1954), A History of the Macedonian Language (1961) and The Language of the
Macedonian Folk Poetry (1971), and in his poetry, Koneski makes use of the ideas developed by
OPYAZ. This paper discusses Koneski’s tacit homage to this legacy in his famous essay “An
Experience” (“Eden opit”). Elaborating on his personal poetics, in this three-part essay Koneski
considers the relationship between tradition and innovation, and links the function of poetry (and
literature in general) with Havránek’s concept of deautomation of language. However,
Koneski’s ultimate defence of poetry rests on an expanded concept of deautomation, which in
fact evokes Shklovsky’s ostranenie. The power of resetting and renewal, concludes Koneski, is
an indispensible manifestation of the human spirit.
The talker: Ivan Dodovski is Associate Professor of Critical Theory at University American
College Skopje, Macedonia. He studied general and comparative literature with American
studies, and obtained an MA degree in Macedonian literature and narratology from Ss. Cyril and
Methodius University in Skopje. He holds a PhD from the University of Nottingham, UK. His
publications include the study Narrative Strategies in the Psychological Novel (2004) and
academic papers on classic and contemporary writers. He has also published three poetry books
and a collection of short stories.
- Teaching Ostranenie: Didactic Issues and the History of the Concept in Literary Theory
Handbooks. Benito E. García-Valero, University of Alicante (Spain)
The talk: One of the central concepts developed by Russian Formalism, ostranenie, presents an
ambiguous nature that has been producing a wide range of translations and explanations since it
was coined by Viktor Shklovsky. The present paper aims at reviewing the main interpretations of
ostranenie which have been developed for didactic purposes in literary theory handbooks.
Teaching and introductory materials in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish are
differentially examined in order to obtain an informed insight into ostranenie by analyzing their
affinities, similarities, variances and the evolution of the concept. Due to this focus on plurality
of interpretations, it is possible to elucidate how thinking on Russian Formalism and its
subsequent theoretical fashions have been leaving their prints on the idea of ostranenie while
shaping it in the process of a demanding effort, actually derived from the necessity of defining a
multifaceted concept for beginners in literary theory.
The talker: Benito E. García-Valero is a Lecturer of Theory of Literature and Comparative
Literature at the University of Alicante (Spain). He obtained an International PhD on Literary
Studies with a dissertation on the interpretations about quantum physics applied to Magical
Realism in two Japanese authors, Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami. His research interests
are focused on the relations between literature and science, as well as the study of fantastic
categories in magical realism and similar aesthetics. His most recent publications in these fields
are La magia cuántica de Haruki Murakami (2015) and La ciencia y la palabra mágica:
confluencias del realismo mágico y la física cuántica (2016).
- The Antinomies of Russian Formalism: The Dialectical Struggle between the Principle of
Ostranenie and the Constructive Principle Basil Lvoff (Vasily Lvov), The Graduate Center of
the City University of New York (US) and Moscow State University (Russia)
The talk: Two equipotent, interwoven yet fundamentally opposed trends coexisted in the
Opoyaz variation of Russian Formalism. The constructive trend reflected Shklovsky, Tynianov,
and Eikhenbaum’s attempt to uncover literature’s structural patterns, first on the level of a text,
then nomothetically, to lay the foundation for the science of literature. But ostranenie presented
the unsystematic trend of the Opoyaz Formalism, focused on pattern breaks.
The antinomy of the two trends will be exemplified in three theoretical conflicts. I will mention
only one here. The Formalists’ “algebraic” endeavors (e.g. the formulae Shklovsky uses in “The
Relationship between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style”) were
annulled by their anti-algebraic attacks (as in “Art as Device”), only to be contradicted again.
Thus, in “Art as Device,” art’s purpose is “to make a stone feel stony,” but in “Literature outside
of Plot,” “confrontations of world or of cats and stones—are all equal in the eyes of literature.”
What Eikhenbaum wrote about the Formalist trend to sacrifice the ideographic, ostranenierelated to the nomothetic, construction-related was true, but it also worked backwards:
“Evolution’s dialectical laws, put forward in our works on literary history, naturally, devalued
our work about the past as they were all the same.” I track this contradiction up until Tynianov
and Jakobson’s theses of 1928.
Most importantly, ostranenie was a trend not only in Shklovsky and his allies’ theory but also in
their scholarly behavior, having grown out of their participation in the literary struggle of the day
as critics and writers. Having applied the estranging trend to itself, Opoyaz Formalism stopped
each time when it could create a system for the science of literature. The talk aims to show the
pendulum of the two trends swung in Opoyaz Formalism, causing its dialectical evolution and
helping it to arrive at a new paradigm for the science of literature.
The talker: Basil Lvoff is a doctoral student of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of
the City University of New York. His dissertation project compares the debate over
depersonalized, quantitative methods of literary scholarship in Russian Formalism and in Digital
Humanities today. In addition, he has recently defended a dissertation in Lomonosov Moscow
State University on the Russian Formalists’ literary journalism.
15.00-16.30, section 2) Ostranenie between Russian, English and
other languages
Chair: Atsushi Tajima, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Japan)
- The Artist as Device: Estrangement and Translingual Writing. Eugenia Kelbert, University
of Passau (Germany)
The talk: A will to “make it foreign,” announced by modernism and continued into the absurd
theatre and the post-modernist tendencies of the second half of the century, is essential to
twentieth century Western literature as we know it. It also happens to be ingrained into the very
stylistic core of a translingual text. Svetlana Boym perceptively compares Brodsky with
Shklovsky, also an émigré, and, indeed, Brodsky explicitly links his learning of English to an
increased perception of the strangeness of language, even his native Russian. Taylor-Batty taps
into the more general condition of writing in a second language when she links multilingualism
with a series of “modernist theories of defamiliarisation,” listing Victor Shklovsky, Stéphane
Mallarmé, Hugo von Hoffmansthal and Walter Benjamin among the best-known proponents of
the idea that the writers live in an era of “linguistic crisis” (10).
That the response to the crisis announced by modernism coincided with what came most
naturally to multilingual writers is largely a quirk of literary history. Yet, multilinguals played
their part in channeling it further. Kellman, among others, makes the point that “[c]olonialism,
war, increased mobility, and the aesthetics of alienation have combined to create a canon of
translingual literature.” He lists Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Fernando Arrabal, Eugène
Ionesco, and Michel de Ghelderode among the multilingual proponents of the Theatre of the
Absurd, a movement that first made alienation into a principle (7).
This paper focuses on examples from second-language writers from modernism to our days to
trace an evolution of translingual estrangement in context. In the modern aesthetic climate, the
peculiarities of translingualism are no longer perceived by the author as a handicap to be
overcome, but – increasingly, if hesitantly –as an advantage to be exploited. The paper thus
traces a gradual transformation of a cognitive factor into a valuable, if often uncooperative, tool
in the writer’s hands in a gesture towards a new history of translingual writing in the twentieth
century.
The talker: Eugenia Kelbert is a Lecturer in Slavic literature and culture at Passau University in
Germany. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale University in May 2015.
Her current book project is based on her dissertation, and focuses on the phenomenon of literary
translingualism in the 20th and 21st century. It argues for a view of translingual or secondlanguage writing as a coherent body of literature with tangible implications for the study of both
translation and self-translation. She has written on Brodsky, Nabokov, Rilke, Eugene Jolas and
Romain Gary, as well as other translingual writers. Her other interests include translation theory,
stylistics, national and identity discourses, poetry, and quantitative approaches to textual
analysis.
- Reinventing Russia: Estrangement in English-language works on Russian themes. Viktor
Sonkin, Moscow State University (Russia)
The talk: “A few more poisonings, and we are back in business,” said a Slavic scholar after the
death of Alexander Litvinenko. It seems that the prophecy is slowly fulfilling: the number of
Russia-related books (both fiction and nonfiction), films and TV show is steadily on the rise.
How does a native Russian eye perceive it? What is the reaction to the inevitable estrangement
that follows automatically when a non-native artist recreates a culture or an era? From Julian
Barnes's fictionalised biography of Dmitri Shostakovich to BBC's “War and Peace”, from Lionel
Davidson's spy thriller “Kolymsky Heights” to NBC's “Allegiance”, examples of creative
estrangement abound in current American and British narrative arts.
The talker: Victor Sonkin is a literary scholar, critic and author. He graduated from Moscow
State University s.c.l. in 1992, and defended his PhD thesis on Slavic verse theory in 1998. He
has since worked as translator for the UN, conference interpreter, columnist for The Moscow
Times and The Times Literary Supplement, a teacher of translation practice (jointly with Dr.
Alexandra Borisenko) at his alma mater. In 2012, a major Russian publishing house published
his historical guidebook “Here Was Rome: Modern Walks in the Ancient City”; next year, the
book was awarded the Prosvetitel (Enlightenment) prize, Russia’s foremost award for original
nonfiction. He also wrote a children’s encyclopaedia of Ancient Rome. He gives lectures on a
wide range of topics from ancient scripts to translation issues. Contact: [email protected]
- Shklovskii’s Sterne. Neil Stewart, University of Bonn (Germany)
The talk: The fictional writings of Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) and the critical writings of
Viktor Shklovskii (1893-1984) may be said to form a kind of symbiosis; while there is always a
strong element of theoretical reflection implicit in the former, the latter with their stylistic
originality and brilliant imagery often read like narrative prose. It is, of course, quite impossible
to say whether Shklovskii deduced his theory of the novel and the concept of ostranenie from a
reading of Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), or whether Sterne’s book came as a godsend to
illustrate the critic’s preconceived theoretical schemes, but in any case, Shklovskii’s 1921 essay
on Tristram Shandy represents his most persuasive critical reading of any single literary text: it
culminates in one of the most famous statements of twentieth-century narrative theory, namely
that Sterne’s notoriously wayward and formless novel was really “the most typical in world
literature”. By demonstratively laying open the “devices” of its own construction, argued
Shklovskii, Tristram Shandy did what all novels do, only it did so openly, in broad daylight. In
another study (1923) he then proceeded to established Sterne’s work as an archetypical “parody
novel”, likening it to Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin in a fascinating (if not entirely flawless) piece of
comparative literary criticism. Shklovskii repeatedly returned to Sterne in his post-Formalist
work, a body of texts that has received relatively little scholarly attention hitherto, but also
constitutes an integral aspect of that remarkable rapport between a Russian critic and his favorite
object of study, a relationship ressembling a lifelong and sometimes troubled love affair.
In my suggested contribution to the Erfurt conference, I would attempt to reconstruct Shkovskii’s
thinking on the English author, taking into account not only his classic 1921 essay, but also
several of his lesser-known later works. Since many of the other participants might be somewhat
more conversant with Shklovskii’s theoretical concepts than with Sterne’s writings, I will focus a
certain deal of attention on Tristram Shandy as such, not least in order to point out some of its
qualities that are maybe not adequately accounted for by the notion of ostranenie.
The talker: Neil Stewart has been a lecturer at the Department of German, Comparative
Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Bonn since 2009. Before that, he worked as
Assistant Professor at the Slavic Department in Bonn (2004-2009). He completed his PhD. as
member of a Graduiertenkolleg (Graduates' Workshop) on Classicism and Romanticism at the
University of Giessen between 2000 and 2003, having previously studied Slavic Literatures and
Languages, Comparative Literature and Eastern European History at the University of Bonn.
His publications include: “Vstan‘ i vspominaj. Auferstehung als Collage in Venedikt Erofeevs
Moskva-Petuški” (1999) and “Glimmerings of Wit. Laurence Sterne und die russische Literatur
von 1790 bis 1840”.
17.00-18.30, section 1) Themes and Devices
Chair: Benito E. García-Valero, University of Alicante (Spain)
- “Do you not recognise it?”. Defamiliarizing the Popular Image of the Bible in Some
Contemporary English Rewritings Ewa Rychter, Angelus Silesius University of Applied
Sciences, Walbrzych (Poland)
The talk: This paper will focus on the ways some recent British and Irish rewritings of the Bible
estrange what has become the publicly accepted and dominant image of the biblical text.
Paraphrasing Albert Schweitzer’s statement about the image of Jesus changing at the hands of
readers of the Bible, one can say that every epoch makes the Bible into its own image, i.e.,
recreates it in accordance with its own character and mind-set. In contemporary Britain, the Bible
has been given the status of “home scripture” (Sherwood 2012) and has become a domesticated
and conservative text, a rather placid cultural/literary monument, an important foundation of
democracy, a venerable religious document judged more tolerant and liberal than other
scriptures. Though the Bible used to be perceived as an explosive text, peppered with potentially
offensive passages, today its enmity is neutralised either by linking the Bible with ancient times
or by relating it to people’s religious beliefs and by entrenching its more scandalous parts within
the discourse of tolerance.
It is such an anodyne image of the Bible that the biblical rewritings of Jeanette Winterson, Julian
Barnes, Jim Crace, Philip Pullman, Colm Toibin, Naomi Alderman, Jenny Diski defamiliarise.
By showing biblical events through the eyes of various non-standard focalisers (e.g., a biblical
redactor, a woodworm, Judas, Caiaphas, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ twin brother, etc.), those
novels disrupt the formulaic patterns of the contemporary perception of the Bible. It is through
these strange perspectives that we observe the critical moment when the overall meaning and the
role of the biblical text is established and the biblical story is actually written down. Importantly,
it is also the moment when somebody moulds the scripture according to their ideas and glosses
over all the complexities, violence and immorality related to the events the biblical text
describes. By exposing power-relations lying behind the creation of the quiescent Bible,
contemporary rewritings defamiliarise the currently popular image of the Bible – that of a
whitewashed text which inculcates morality, conserves social order and teaches love and
tolerance.
The talker: Ewa Rychter holds a doctorate degree in literary theory. In 2008, she completed
Biblical Studies at the Pontifical Faculty of Theology in Wroclaw, Poland. She is the author of a
monograph (Un)Saying the Other (Frankfurt 2004), editor of a volume of essays on post-theory
(in Polish, Po(granicza) teorii, Walbrzych 2010), editor of Beyond 2000: The Recent Novel in
English (Walbrzych 2011), co-editor of a scholarly journal Orbis Linguarum. She is also the
author of more thirty articles on literary theory, contemporary philosophy, the Bible in
contemporary culture, as well as on contemporary British fiction.
-Normalcy as Estrangement. Some Thoughts on Holocaust-Related Literature. Walter
Geerts, University of Antwerp (Belgium)
The talk: “Holocaust-related literature” is considered, for the sake of this paper proposal, as
literature characterized by different degrees of elaboration of the historical evidence of the
Holocaust. Basically two types of authors of this literary output can be distinguished: prisonerssurvivors and non-prisoners fictionally dealing with the topic. Both are confronted with different
options for which to make a decision, among which the kind of rhetoric, or stylistics, to put in
place. With respect to this situation I would like to examine specifically two points: the first,
directly related to ostranenie or estrangement, the second, related to some considerations within
cognitive poetics triggered by the first. Roughly sketched, some of the issues appear to be the
following. What could be implied by ostranenie if, as is sometimes the case, a specific rhetorical
register of 'normalcy' is selected (cfr. Chklovski's considerations on the question in La
construction de la nouvelle et du roman). As to the aspects linked to cognitive poetics: what are
we talking about in this case? a certain poetic language chosen as an end in itself? or is
something else at stake? I would like to illustrate the questions raised with examples mainly
taken from Primo Levi's and Imre Kertész' texts.
The talker: Walter Geerts, PhD, is currently Professor Emeritus of Italian and Comparative
Literature at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Former appointments: head of the Italian
Culture department at University Utrecht, Netherlands (1989-1993) and director of the Belgian
Academy in Rome (2003-2012). He published extensively on French and Italian authors from
nineteenth century until today.
-“Where Amazement Appears, Art Begins”: Ostranenie in Boris Smirnov’s Design Theory
and Practice, 1960s – 1970s. Yulia Karpova, Aarhus University (Denmark)
The talk: My paper will trace the impact of the Ostranenie concept in late Soviet design by
examining the work of prominent Leningrad architect, designer, photographer and theorist Boris
Smirnov. One of the active proponents of design reform after Stalin’s death, in the mid-1960s
Smirnov offered his vision of material culture and artistic creativity that went far beyond the
guidelines of institutionalized Soviet design. In doing so, Smirnov relied extensively on the
concept of Ostranenie – though reformulated in different terms, such as “surprise” and
“amazement” - as well as on Shklovsky’s later work. In his conceptual objects in glass and
ceramics and in his 1970s theoretical monographs “Artist on the Nature of Things,” Smirnov
used Ostranenie as a tool of design oriented at harmonizing relations between humans and nature
and satisfying diverse emotional and spiritual needs. While the revival of avant-garde artistic
principles in post-war Soviet design has been discussed in a number of studies, my paper
elucidates another line of continuity, while also demonstrating previously unexplored aspect of
Ostranenie’s afterlife in late socialism.
The talk: Yulia Karpova is a Visiting Lecturer at Central European University (Budapest) and at
Budapest Metropolitan University of Applied Sciences. She received her MA in History and
Theory of Visual Arts from St. Petersburg State Academy of Art and Design in St. Petersburg,
Russia, and her PhD in Comparative History from Central European University with the
dissertation “Designer Socialism: The Aesthetic Turn in Soviet Russia after Stalin.” In May 2014
she co-organized with Tom Cubbin an international conference “(De)Constructing Utopia:
Design in Eastern Europe from Thaw to Perestroika” at the Humanities Research institute, the
University of Sheffield. She recently received a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship for the 24month research project on Soviet design of domestic objects in 1953-1991.
- Second Person Narration as Ostranenie Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik, Polish Academy
of Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw (Poland)
The talk: In my paper I will analyze contemporary status of the second-person narration. This
narrative form used to be neglected in narratological typologies or considered as unsignificant,
ephemeral version of first person narration. However, the uncommonness of „you” narration
turned out to be one of the most striking formal devices within the theory and practice of the
French „nouveau roman” (and its local, national modifications). Employing this narrative
technigue by M. Butor (LA Modification, 1957) led to reconceptualization of basic narratological
concepts: „person”, „voice”, „narrator”, „narratee”. Moreover, due to its semantical unstability
and subversive potential, such narrative form destabilized the conventional destinctions between
story and discourse, fictional and actual worlds, characters and readers. For these reasons, second
person narratives popularity have increased in the last few decades (J. Barth Sabbatical, T.
Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, L. Moore Self-Help, A. Oz Judas, many other examples
from Polish literature of 21th century will be given). In accordance with this trend, current
debates among postclassical narratologists (M. Fludernik, B. Richardson. D, Herman, U.
Margolin, A. Palmer. A. Marcus) have confirmed the urgent need of new theory and reevaluation
of this form. My goal is to examine the origins of the defimiliarization effects of second-person
narration. In the context of intermedia research, I would like to discuss the question: can we still
call this form ostranenie// is this device familiarized („naturalized”) in contemporary culture and
literature (hypertexts, social media forms?).
The talker: Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik, Ph.D. Head of Historical Poetics Department at
the Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. A literary historian and
theorist, who focuses on narrative studies. She has published Poetyka i antropologia. Cykl
podolski W. Odojewskiego [Poetics and anthropology. W. Odojewski’s Podolian cycle] (Kraków
2004) and Poetyka intersubiektywności. Kognitywistyczna teoria narracji a proza XX wieku
[Poetics of intersubjectivity. Cognitive narratology and the 20th-century prose] (Toruń 2012).
She is a life member of Clare Hall College, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
17.00-18.30, section 2) The Literariness of Media Art
A panel by the University of Hamburg, Germany
Chair: Ridvan Askin, University of Basel (Switzerland)
At the beginning of the 20th century, Russian literary critics set out to spread a new definition of
the nature of literature. Now known as Russian formalism, their movement introduced the notion
of “literariness” as a way to refer to the qualities of literary language, which they considered
distinct from the habitualized, everyday use of language. The notion of “literariness”
(literaturnost), coined by Roman Jakobson in 1921, delineates the subject of the study of
literature. It is based on the assumption that literary language intentionally deviates from
established norms and rules of language use. Literary techniques mark an artwork’s artistic
qualities; the two specific devices of “estranging objects” and “complicating form” slow down,
prolong, and consequently de-automatize the process of perception, which is key to our analyses
of media art. This intensified perception causes the artwork to be perceived as opaque because its
materiality is laid bare.
The panel The Literariness of Media Art presents examples of an investigation of the potential of
literary theory for the analysis of media art. Literariness serves as a guiding concept to describe
the aesthetic surplus and estrangement created by a “non-pragmatic”, artificial use of language.
Instances of literariness can be found in poetic titles, integrated script segments, acousmatic
voices, multimodal-language installations, quotations or adaptations of literary works, or
variations of literary genres. Using examples from international video art and experimental film,
the panel particularly focuses on dimensions of signification that are related – but not limited to –
language, voice, and script. Features of literary genres – especially prose and drama – were of
importance to the development of Formalist criticism. The three presentations of this panel
investigate how media art reflects, investigates, appropriates and alienates the genres poetry,
prose, and drama. This triadic classification of literature has been challenged by artistic practices
and theoretically contested by literary scholars. However, its use as a heuristic tool is still
common and valuable as an effectual leverage for forging a path into the complex terrain of
language use in works of media art.
The talks:
1. Excessive Structures and Trans-Sense. Poetry in Media Art (Jordis Lau)
Lyric poetry has been characterized as the genre that subjects language to an excessive
structuring, for example through verse and rhyme. This paper explores how the formalist
principle of “complicating form” is turned into a device of aesthetic estrangement in media art. It
further revisits the notion of “poetic images” – zaum’ images that are not bound by the “inner
speech” of a lyric subjectivity but lay bare the artworks’ materiality.
2.
Violating Prose in Media Art (Maraike Magdalene Marxsen)
Literary genres are a prime example of formulaic prescriptions that condition artistic creation
and critical appreciation. Simultaneously, the defamiliarization of literary norms is – as the
formalists highlighted – the driving and necessary impulse that impacts the emergence of new
artistic and literary forms. This paper presents case studies to highlight how the norms of
narrative genres are playfully violated in media art.
3.
Theatrical Overabundance. Elements of Drama and Ostranenie in Media Art (Claudia
Benthien)
Drama is the literary genre that distinguishes itself from a narrative or lyric text by lack of a
mediating instance; it is constituted through self-statements of the dramatis personae. Media art
reflects both on the dialogic structure of drama and on the theater as a dispositive in myriad
ways. This paper presents works that pick up, foreground and thus alienate conventions of
classical tragedy or that expose their own performance’s theatrical overabundance by “making it
strange”.
The talkers:
Claudia Benthien is professor for German literature and cultural theory at the University of
Hamburg, Germany (PhD 1998, Humboldt-University, Berlin). She is currently head of the
research project Literarizität in der Medienkunst, and of the research project “Performing
Poetry”. Mediale Übersetzungen und situationale Rahmungen zeitgenössischer Lyrik. Her
published monographs are Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World (Columbia
UP, 2002), Barockes Schweigen. Rhetorik und Performativität des Sprachlosen im 17.
Jahrhundert (Fink, 2006) and Tribunal der Blicke. Kulturtheorien von Scham und Schuld und die
Tragödie um 1800 (Böhlau, 2011).
Jordis Lau studied art history and English literature in Frankfurt and Cardiff. She is a PhD
candidate at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and research associate in the DFG project
Literarizität in der Medienkunst. Her dissertation is entitled Foregrounding the Past. Literary
Modernism in Media Art.
Maraike M. Marxsen studied media culture, German literature, and film in Hamburg and
Amsterdam. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and research
associate in the DFG project Literarizität in der Medienkunst. Her dissertation is entitled Deviant
Girls, Deviant Forms. Feminine Adolescence in Media Art and Experimental Film.
17.12, Saturday
All events take place at the Collegium Maius, Michaelisstraße 39, Erfurt.
10.00-11.30 section 1) Genre Studies
Chair: Ridvan Askin, University of Basel (Switzerland)
- Ostranenie in the Detective Fiction of G. K. Chesterton. Beatrix Hesse, University of
Bamberg (Germany)
The talk: When Viktor Shklovsky discussed the genre of detective fiction in Chapter 5 of his
Theory of Prose, he famously chose the Sherlock Holmes story “The Speckled Band” as his main
example. However, he also mentions in passing a detective story by G. K. Chesterton, “The
Queer Feet” from The Innocence of Father Brown (1911). In several ways, Chesterton’s
detective stories would have provided a more appropriate example of Shklovsky’s concept of
ostranenie than the work of Conan Doyle, as I will proceed to demonstrate. In his essay, “A
Defence of Detective Stories” from The Defendant (1901), Chesterton outlines a prime quality of
detective fiction, which is the creation of a sense of estrangement and wonder comparable to the
readerly attitude requested by Shklovsky in his first chapter, “Art as Device”: “The first essential
value of the detective story lies in this, that it is the earliest and only form of popular literature in
which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. […] No one can have failed to
notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London with something of the
loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland, that in the course of that incalculable
journey the casual omnibus assumes the primal colours of a fairy ship.” As in Doyle’s stories, the
denouement in Chesterton’s stories also requires a radical re-contextualisation of the clues
presented as well as a re-conceptualisation of previously held beliefs. But in the case of
Chesterton, the use of defamiliarisation goes beyond mere plot design and also manifests itself
on the level of world creation (Chesterton had a deep-rooted penchant for colourful sceneries and
characters) and style (Chesterton’s love of paradox). Paradox is the stylistic trope most
conspicuous in Chesterton’s writing and was famously defined by himself as "Truth standing on
her head to attract attention" in The Paradoxes of Mr Pond. Using the short story “The Perishing
of the Pendragons” from The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914) as my main example, I will
examine the use of defamiliarisation on the three levels of plot design, fictional world and style.
The talker: Beatrix Hesse’s two main areas of expertise are Shakespeare’s plays and crime
fiction – she earned her PhD for a study of recurrent patterns of communication in
Shakespearean comedy (Shakespeares Komödien aus der Sicht der Pragmatischen
Kommunikationstheorie, LIT, 1997) and wrote her second book on the development of the
English crime play (The English Crime Play in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan,
2015). Other fields of interest include 20th-century drama and Victorian fiction.
- Diegetic Estrangement as a Key to a Poetics of Utopian Literature. Simon Spiegel,
University of Zurich (Switzerland)
The talk: In the last chapter of Edward Bellamy’s immensely successful utopian novel Looking
Backward. 2000–1887, its protagonist Julian West has a horrifying dream: He dreams that he no
longer lives in the blessed year 2000 where thanks to a superior – socialist – organisation of
society most social ills of the late 19th century are simply unknown. Instead he dreams to wake
up again in 1887, the time he originally came from. He is struck by how miserable his world of
origin appears to him now that he has seen the wonders of the future. But as he rightly observes,
the Boston of 1887 is the way it has always been, rather it is he himself who has turned into
someone different. “I knew well that it was I who had changed, and not my contemporaries. I
had dreamed of a city whose people fared all alike as children of one family and were one
another’s keepers in all things “(Bellamy 182).
This dream sequence – from which West luckily awakes – develops in nuce a whole poetics
of utopian literature. What the protagonist of Looking Backward lives through is exactly what its
reader should experience as well: To be transformed by the utopian vision and therefore to see
his own world anew – with all its deficiencies and injustices.
Estrangement lies indeed at the core of all utopian literature, but as I will argue in my paper, it
is a kind of estrangement which works along different lines than Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie.
Where as ostranenie is mainly a formal device, the means by which things are presented, utopian
literature typically creates its estranging effects by contrasting seemingly incompatible elements
on the level of the story itself. Contrary to Shklovsky’s approach, utopian literature primarily
makes use of diegetic estrangement.
The talk: Simon Spiegel, PhD, is research fellow at the Department of Film Studies at the
University of Zurich. He collaborator in the research project Alternative Weltentwürfe: Der
politisch-aktivistische Dokumentarfilm funded by Swiss National Science Foundation. Important
publications: “Das blaue Wunder. Naturalisierung, Verfremdung und digitale Figuren in James
Camerons Avatar”. Fremde Welten. Wege und Räume der Fantastik im 21. Jahrhundert. Ed.
Lars Schmeink, Hans-Harald Müller. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 2012, 203–222. Theoretisch
phantastisch: Eine Einführung in Tzvetan Todorovs Theorie der phantastischen Literatur.
Murnau: p.machinery, 2010; Die Konstitution des Wunderbaren: Zu einer Poetik des ScienceFiction-Films. Schüren: Marburg, 2007.
- “I am a Professional Storyteller”: Writing the Picaresque Self in Shklovsky’s Sentimental
Journey. Cassio de Oliveira, Portland State University (US)
The talk: At first sight, Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie seems to concern aesthetic
response rather than artistic form, technique, or genre per se, topics which Shklovsky analyzes
with keen sensibility elsewhere in his work. Despite this apparent disregard for theories of genre
when discussing ostranenie, Shklovsky, in his writings from the Revolution through the early
1930s, pays special attention to a specific literary form or genre, namely the picaresque. His
essays and articles often reference narratives from the picaresque tradition, from Lazarillo de
Tormes to Don Quixote (often called the first modern novel, and one that engages critically with
the picaresque), from Mark Twain’s to Il’f and Petrov’s works. Moreover, Shklovsky’s
biographical and autobiographical texts from the 1920s, including Sentimental’noe puteshestvie
and Tret’ia fabrika, explicitly engage with the picaresque tradition in terms of form as well as
content. The concept of the picaresque greatly shaped the first decades of Shklovsky’s writing,
yet the nature of this influence, and the genre’s relevance to interpreting the concept of
ostranenie, have thus far been little explored.
My talk will address the relationship between literary form and ostranenie by analyzing the role
of the picaresque in Shklovsky’s oeuvre, especially (a) in his discussions of Don Quixote and
classical Spanish picaresque narratives, and (b) in his autobiographical writings. Insofar as the
picaresque engages with realistic (“naïve”) representation and simultaneously with the
picaresque author’s growing awareness of the creative process (“self-consciousness”), the genre
exposes the double-bind of ostranenie as a purely aesthetic-phenomenological concept and as an
ethical principle whereby art is able to affect reality. I will demonstrate that the picaresque, as an
unstable genre subject to reinterpretation and intense debates regarding its purview (whether as a
sociological construct or as a literary-historical concept), proved instrumental in the articulation
of Shklovsky’s poetics of ostranenie.
The talker: Cassio de Oliveira (Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University) is
Assistant Professor of Russian in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at
Portland State University. He is currently at work on a book manuscript based on his doctoral
dissertation, provisionally entitled Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque, 1921-1938, in which
he analyzes the emergence of the picaresque mode in the context of various nation- and empirebuilding projects in Soviet literature of the NEP era and High Stalinism. His research has been
published in Canadian Slavonic Papers, Slavonica, and Studies in Slavic Cultures, among other
outlets.
10.00-11.30, section 2) Embodiment, Materiality and Resistance
Chair: Anke Hennig, University of the Arts, London (UK)
- The Automobilization of Theory: How a Car Became a Tool of Literary Analysis. Jan
Levchenko, Higher School of Economics, Moscow (Russia)
The talk: Viktor Shklovsky has discovered a literary device of ‘Ostranenie’ (that is being
roughly translated as Defamiliarization, Estrangement, Making Strange, etc) on the point break
of Russian revolution. The very theoretical mechanism of ‘ostranenie’ is full of revolutionary
energy, destructive and creative at the same time. Although some critics associated ‘ostranenie’
with ahistoricity and essentialism (from Mikhail Bakhtin to Frederic Jameson), other historians
always knew well about the closest relations between the course of the WWI and the growth of
the early Formalist theory. Shklovsky was mobilized as a mechanic, he was a high-qualified
driver specialized on armored cars and other military vehicles. The importance of a car as a
source of ideas about how a literary text is being made, what are the basic ways of its
development and so forth, was demonstrated in Shklovsky’s memoir-travelogue ‘Sentimental
Journey’ (1923). The present paper is to summarize its main theoretical devices and to track their
latest references in Shklovsky’s writings of the 1930s and the 1940s. It could be argued, as a
rough approximation, that Shklovsky remained very sensitive to the function of transport as a
literary character and a basic metaphor for the narrative analysis.
The talker: Jan Levchenko, PhD in semiotics, graduated from the University of Tartu, Estonia.
Also he holds MA in art history by the European University at St. Petersburg. He taught various
courses related to history of critical theory in Russia, culture theory, film history, visual studies,
etc, in Estonia (Tartu, Tallinn) and Russia (St. Petersburg, Moscow). During 2001-2013 he was
also active as a cultural journalist, film and musical critic. He’s an author of Drugaya Nauka.
Russkie formalisty v poiskakh biografii (Moscow, 2012; The Other Science. Russian Formalists
in pursuit of biography). His current position is a professor of cultural studies in National
Research University ‘Higher School of Economics’, Moscow.
- Embodied Estrangement and Transformation of Subject. Georgy Chernavin, Higher School
of Economics, Moscow (Russia)
The talk: I argue that the philosophical θαυμάζειν (wonder which took in phenomenological
philosophy the form of Er-staunen) and aesthetical estrangement (the clue artistic procedure
thematized in the Russian Formalism) are two forms of the same basic human ability: of the
ability of astonishment. The Shklovskian ostranenie will be brought in context of
phenomenological philosophy, namely of the texts Eugen Fink's and Martin Heidegger's of
1930s, were we find «incomprehensibility of the obvious (Unverständlichkeit des
Selbstverständlichen)» and «unusualness of the most usual (Ungewöhnlichkeit des
Gewöhnlichsten)» as basic affective tonalities of philosophical thinking.
In the phenomenological philosophy wonder is understood transitively (Er-staunen); it serves
as a guideline for the philosophical work. I claim that in the case of phenomenological method
we find an example of an «embodiment» of estrangement into the very structure of the
subjectivity. Russian Formalism doesn't share this approach: for Schklovsky, Jakobson or
Eichenbaum it was quite typical to hold an incredulous distance from the classical concept of
subject or subjectivity. For the Formalism the art is a device, and the estrangement is one of its
techniques; but the phenomenological philosophy tends to use the «estrangement» more radically
as a device of the transformation of the subjectivity. In my paper I will also propose the
following hypothesis: the phenomenological experience can help us to refine the groundwork
laid by Shklovsky by means of including the life of subject into consideration, than ostranenie
becomes a productive technique not only for literary criticism, but also for contemporary
philosophy.
The talker: Georgy Chernavin, Ph.D. in philosophy from the universities of Toulouse and
Wuppertal, assistant professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics,
Moscow. Key publications: La phénoménologie en tant que philosophie-en-travail (Amiens:
Association pour la Promotion de la Phénoménologie, 2014); Transzendentale Archäologie Ontologie - Metaphysik: Methodologische Alternativen in der phänomenologischen Philosophie
Husserls (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2011). Email: [email protected]
- Resisting Theater: 17th Century Antecedents of Ostranenie. Maria Neklyudova, School of
Social and Economic Sciences, Moscow (Russia)
The talk: One of the most quoted (and vividly remembered) instances of ostranenie from
Shklovsky’s essay is an episode at the theater from Tolstoy’s War and Peace, even though it is
more ambiguous than other examples that he cites. Ostranenie in this case does seem to drift
closer to Brecht’s concept of Verfremdung where the theater and the ‘social scene’ function as
interrelated entities, and ‘distancing’ from either of them has clear ideological implications.
Tolstoy’s debt to Rousseau (particularly to his writings against the theater) and Brecht’s
dependency on the 18th century theorists (including Diderot) point out to the common source of
their critique, the 17th century and the early 18th century discussion of spectator’s intérêt, its
physiological and psychological mechanics, and the desirable degree of involvement in the show.
The ethic (and partially esthetic) objections to the emotional imprisonment of the theater goers
(and later the novels’ readers) formulated by the French moralists owed less to the religious
reasons than to the quasi aristocratic resistance to any kind of subjugation. Thus it had not only
spiritual but a certain political meaning (which brings us back to Rousseau and Brecht).
The talker: Maria Neklyudova (Ph.D. in Comparative Lit.) is a specialist in the 17th and the
18th Century French literature and culture, the author of two monographs on the
conceptualization of private life and courtly culture during the reign of Louis XIV. She is
currently teaching at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences as well as at the
School of Public Policy (RANEPA), and co-conducts an independent research project ‘Theatrum
mundi’ (http://theatrummundi.ru/english).
12.00-13.30, 10.00-11.30, section 1) Mediality
Chair: Neil Stewart, University of Bonn (Germany)
- Zombi-Formalism. A retro-formalist approach to Viktor Shklovsky’s filmscript Horror
Anke Hennig, University of the Arts, London (UK)
The talk is a practice-based approach to the script of Shklovsky’s unrealised film, Horror
(Strach, 1930). The drama is set in a Soviet State Laboratory which performs experiments on the
conditioning of animals and the behaviour of man according to the psychology of Ivan Pavlov.
She will present the results of an experimental workshop at Künstlerhäuser Worpswede in
rewriting the pivotal scene of Horror. Close reading, translation and art practice will be brought
together in an approach at shaping possible meanings of formalism today.
The talker: Anke Hennig is a theorist of 21st century literature and visual culture. Currently she
is visiting professor for media theory at University of the Arts, Berlin and teaching at Central
Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. She is chairing the international research group
Retro-Formalism (www.retroformalism.net) and co-founder of the trans-national research
platform Speculative Poetics (www.Spekulative-Poetik.de).
She is the author of Soviet Cinematic Dramaturgy (in German, 2010) and, in cooperation with
Armen Avanessian, co-author of Present Tense. A Poetics (2015, in Russian 2014, in German
2012) and of Metanoia. Speculative Ontology of Language (forthcoming, in German 2014).
- A Hundred Years of Classic Cinema: Ostranenie, Cinema and Other Arts. Janica Tomić,
Zagreb University (Croatia)
The talk: The coinage of the term Ostranenie in Shklovsky’s essay coincides with the symbolic
birth of classical narrative cinema, the dominant that replaced the early or pre-cinema period
whose retrospective unconventionality has since haunted avant-garde and experimental cinema.
The paper will sketch how the concept of Ostraniene is embedded in cinema history by tracing
its manifestations in some of the prominent definitions of the medium – starting from early film
theories by V. Shklovsky (1927), B. Eihenbaum (1927) or E. Panofsky (1934-47), whose
fascination with the modern medium relied on the premise of its ontological difference and
imperative of breaking with conventions of earlier art forms, especially theatre and novel. In
contrast to such media specificity arguments, A. Bazin (1967–71) would later propose that the
automatized language of classical cinema should be renewed by modelling itself on those of
theatre and neighbouring arts. By drawing on examples of film theories by A. Michelson or L.
Mulvey (2006), as well as the films of directors Roy Anderson, Lars von Trier or Ben Rivers, the
paper will discuss how the concept of Ostranenie has continued to inform cinema’s relation to
other arts.
The talker: Dr. sc. Janica Tomić is a docent at the English Department of the Faculty of
Philosophy, Zagreb University. She has a PhD in cinema studies and an MA in comparative
literature and English language and literature. Her research work focuses on the early and silent
cinema, contemporary Scandinavian and European cinema, early and classical film theory.
- Aesthetic Formalism: Alexander Rodchenko and the Art of Estrangement. Anastasia Koro,
Queen Mary University, London (UK)
The talk: The paper will introduce a case study of the relations between Formalism and
Constructivism using the example of Shklovsky and Rodchenko. It will offer a basic overview of
their mutual evolution as well as the analysis of theoretical overlaps and differences related to
the conception of estrangement.
The paper will seek to answer the questions: whether the conception of estrangement was
of any importance to Rodchenko, how did he understand it and what were the differences
and the similarities with relation to Shklovsky. I believe a careful investigation of these
questions may illuminate a green field of research encompassing two major visions of art
derived from the legacy of early avant-garde.
The talker: Anastasia Koro is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary,
University of London. Her research focuses on Russian Formalist and Constructivist aesthetic
theory and she also teaches European literature. Anastasia is a founder and an organizer of a
Russian Literary Salon in London whose membership is primarily academic and which convenes
regularly to discuss Russian Modernist literature.
12.00-13.30, section 2) Close Readings 2
Chair: Beatrix Hesse, University of Bamberg (Germany)
- Ostranenie and Book Experience: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves Cindy Heine,
University of Siegen (Germany)
The talk: House of Leaves underlines Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of Ostranenie by making the
reader aware of the most usual things like a white page or a book cover. A detailed analysis of
selected pages from House of Leaves written by Danielewski will to show how the
defamiliarization not just renders the page and the book as an object extraordinary but also the
practice of reading. Arranging words and letters in a certain way, Danielewski emphasizes the
white page so that it becomes equal to the letters and is not just a blank background to fill. For
some pages the reader has to turn the book or use a mirror which makes it really hard to read the
book fluently, but at the same time it stresses the conventional way of reading. It seems that the
experimenting with the book is sometimes more interesting than the actual content, but in this
way the reader perceives both the book and his practice anew.
The talker: Cindy Heine studied Literary Theory and Comparative Literature and Philosophy in
the Bachelor programme at the University of Erfurt and continued in the Master programme
Texte. Zeichen. Medien. She wrote an MA thesis on House of Leaves. Currently she is a doctoral
student in the post-graduate programme Locating Media in Siegen, working on a thesis about
travelling and movement in one’s own room or house and practices of perceiving space while
living in it.
- Instances and Agencies of the Text – Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire Jessica Maaßen,
University of Erfurt
The talk: At the first glimpse the reader of Vladimir Nabokov´s novel Pale Fire (1962) may not
recognize that the foreword is already part of the fiction. The novel consists of a 999-lined poem
titled “Pale Fire” by a fictional poet John Shade plus a foreword, an extensive commentary and
an index by the (also fictional) literary scholar Charles Kinbote.
The novel plays with conventions of the literary scene and questions editorial instances and
agencies (such as typesetter, annotator, editor, and publisher). The seemingly clear boundaries
between literature and literary studies dissolve and are intricately interlaced.
In the process of reading the reader has to make decisions permanently – the novel can be read
either straight through, in sections or jumping between the poem and the comments. Thus an
“automatic perception” is in the sense of Ostranenie averted. Besides these meta- and
hypertextual reflections, Nabokov´s use of parentheses and irony can be seen as devices of
Ostranenie, too. Parentheses and irony comment and reflect on the text although still being part
of the text – but the plotline is interrupted. Pale Fire (1962) challenges its readers on several
levels and was judged by some critics even as “unreadable” [Dwight Macdonald] – maybe
because they were not aware of Ostranenie.
The talker: Jessica Maaßen studied Comparative Religion with an emphasis on Islamic
Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Erfurt. Her search interests are
migration literature, theory of the modern novel, intermediality, literary remains, literary
devices, devices and cultural technique of bureaucracy (esp. index cards, records). She has a
focus in the cross-disciplinary research field of law & literature. She wrote her Bachelor Thesis
about the case of Salman Rushdie´s controversial novel "The Satanic Verses”, her Master
Thesis focused on Vladimir Nabokov´s “Lolita” and the establishment of paradigms in and by
the novel. Since December 2015 Jessica Maassen holds a PhD bursary of the University of
Erfurt and is currently writing her dissertation about Vladimir Nabokov´s last, unfinished novel
fragment The Original of Laura. The dissertation raises not only questions of literary remains,
copyrights and the author-reader relationship but also takes into account alienation effects
provoked by the edition.
- Narratology, Defamiliarization and Kafka Eva S. Wagner, University of Osnabrück
(Germany)
The talker: Since Shklovsky’s introduction of the notion of ‘enstrangement,’ a great deal of
effort has been put into both developing and criticising the idea of ‘making strange’ as the artistic
hallmark of literature. One of the questions raised by the concept concerns its generic
implications: Which distinctive forms does ‘defamiliarization’ take in lyrical, dramatic and
narrative literature?
Examining the role which the concept plays in narratology, Sternberg (2006) sharply criticises
the identification of artful ‘defamiliarization’ with contortions of the temporal order of the fabula
(‘story’) on the level of narrative sjuzhet (‘discourse’). He polemicises against the link which
Shklovsky and other theorists establish between literariness and forms of narrative disorder,
claiming instead that literary narrativity depends on a context-sensitive interplay of various
(orderly as well as disorderly) narrative forms and three universal master functions, notably
‘suspense,’ ‘curiosity’ and ‘surprise.’
But can Sternberg’s narrative “universals” explain the specific, “Kafkaesque” effects which
Franz Kafka’s narratives create in readers? Challenging Sternberg’s claims, my contribution
analyses the extent to which The Castle ―and its literary appraisal― lives by a cognitolinguistic disorder which cannot be reduced to these three master functions. Drawing on
formalist (Shklovsky; Jakobson), structuralist (Fricke) and cognitivist (Tsur) dimensions of
defamiliarization, I will argue that Kafka achieves ‘enstranging’ effects by a narrative dynamics
of ‘withdrawal,’ partly akin to G. Neumann’s ‘sliding paradox,’ by which Kafka keeps his
readers in a never-ending process of coherence in progress.
The talker: Eva Sabine Wagner has studied German and French philology at the universities of
Göttingen and Cologne. In 2010, she has been awarded the Price of the Faculty of Arts for her
graduate thesis on deviant narrative structures in Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste. Subsequently, she
gained a Lichtenberg scholarship and attended the doctoral programme TMTG (Text Studies),
chaired by Prof. Dr. Simone Winko (University of Göttingen) and Prof. Dr. Christoph König
(University of Osnabrück). Eva S. Wagner teaches French Literature at the University of
Cologne and is currently working on her PhD thesis which analyses concepts and literary forms
of ‘narrativity.’ Her research focus is on literary and narrative theory, experimental narratives
and the Age of Enlightenment.
- Metalepsis as Ostranenie? “A School for Fools” by Sasha Sokolov and Estrangement of
the Strange Maria Donska, University of Salzburg (Austria)
The talk: Metalepsis, introduced in narratological studies by Gérard Genette, designates the
intrusion of an extradiegetic narrator in the intradiegetic world or another violation of the
boundaries between the world of telling and the world of the told. As such it focuses the reader
on the relation between narrative levels, laying bare the constructedness of the narrative.
Can its effect be compared with ostranenie? The question stands to reason since some texts
elaborately discussed by Shklovsky – for example, Laurence Sternes “Tristram Shandy” –
contain various metalepses.
Metaleptic passages build an essential part of Sasha Sokolov’s “A School for Fools”. The authorpersona interrupts the narrator/the main hero, asks him about his opinion on the written parts of
the book, discusses with him a proper title and finally goes with him out to buy some more paper
for the continuation of the story. Ostranenie is about re-seeing, re-defining something habitual.
Does ostranenie work as well in such formal unusual and experimental text as “A School for
Fools” is? If almost everything (the narrative structure, identity of main characters, time
perception, language etc.) is strange, is ostranenie still possible? These questions will be
discussed based on the analysis of metaleptic elements in the text.
The talker: Mariya Donska is a literary scholar born in Charkiw, Ukraine. She became her
Magister degree in classical philology and Ukrainian in 2007, continued with a DAADScholarship for Master Studies Comparative Literature in Munich 2009. After working as a
translator and further studying in Graz (Russian and Old Greek as a teacher, in progress) she is
writing her PhD thesis since 2013 and working at the Department of Slavic Studies in the
University of Salzburg, Austria.
13.30-14.00 Final remarks