Critical Theory in Russia and the West

Alastair Renfrew is Reader in Russian and Director of Research in the School of Modern Languages at Durham University.Galin Tihanov is Professor of Comparative Literature and Intellectual History and Co-Director of the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures at The University of Manchester.

• Preface 1. The Resurrection of a Poetics Alastair Renfrew 2. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bakhtin on Art and Immortality Caryl Emerson and Inessa Medzhibovskaya 3. Innovation and Regression: Gustav Shpet’s Theoretical Concerns in the 1920s Galin Tihanov 4. ‘Once out of Nature’: The Organic Metaphor in Russian (and other) Theories of Language Thomas Seifrid 5. Roman Jakobson and Philology Michael Holquist 6. The Poetics and Politics of Estrangement: Viktor Shklovsky and Hannah Arendt Svetlana Boym 7. The Shaved Man’s Burden: The Russian Novel as a Romance of Internal Colonization Alexander Etkind 8. Feminism, Untranslated: Russian Gender Studies and Cross-cultural Transfer in the 1990s and Beyond Carol Adlam 9. From Post- to Proto-: Bakhtin and the Future of the Humanities Mikhail Epstein 10. Beyond the Text Vitalii Makhlin

"Many chapters offer new perspectives on familiar phenomena, sketch new theoretical vistas or engage the reader in exciting theoretical dialogues. [This book] presents an important and gratifying attempt to place theory in the historical context and to bring it closer to the main humanistic and social concerns of the twenty-first century. It offers a thought-provoking and stimulating appraisal." - Marina Grishakova, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Tartu; Slavonic and East European Review (vol. 91, no. 2, April 2013).