Please join us this Friday, 4/14 for the Interdisciplinary Approaches to Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia (REECA) workshop!
This week’s paper is:
Symbolist Poetics of Correspondence
Monica Felix, University of Chicago
Paper description/abstract:
This paper is the fourth chapter of a dissertation which develops a transcultural model for literary movements by exploring the emergence of literary Romanticism in 18th-century Germany and its reemergence in Russian literature. By identifying key traits of a Romantic “imagination” in German and Russian literature, I reveal a modality that has continued to function in defiance of the traditional boundaries of literary periodization. In particular, my project attends to the Romantic topos of an aesthetic encounter as a historicizing struggle between memory and deception. I analyze these moments as a type of Augentäuschung, playing on the two semantic possibilities of this German term that can be understood either as “optical illusion” or, more literally, as a “deception/confusion of the eyes.” Treating this ambiguity of aesthetic representation as a central trait of the Romantic imagination, my analysis challenges the constraints of traditional literary periodization by identifying evolutions of this Romantic motif in 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature. The work of this chapter is to challenge traditional periodization by exploring transformations of the Augentäuschung motif in Russian Symbolism. The hermeneutic crisis endemic to these moments reemerges in the form of unusual correspondences – unlikely or improbable pairings – that generate the mystical situation. I examine the lyric verse by Aleksandr Blok, Valerii Briusov, and Viacheslav Ivanov as representative instances of the Symbolist inheritance of Augentäuschung, which evolves to accommodate overlapping realms of existence. Whereas the phenomenal and fantastic represented mutually exclusive realities for German Romantics, I argue that comparable moments of ambiguity in Russian Symbolism occur during encounters between the phenomenal and the universal with the poet uniting them through a creative act of theurgic mediation.
Discussant: Zachary King
April 14, 2017
11am-12:20pm in Foster Hall Room 103
University of Chicago
Tea will be serve. You are welcome to bring your lunch.
The paper is available on our website under the ‘Papers’ tab. For more information, visit our website: https://voices.uchicago.edu/reeca/papers/
Please contact me (christymonet@uchicago.edu) if you have any questions or if you believe you may need assistance.