Asiya Bulatova | Södertörn University (original) (raw)
Papers by Asiya Bulatova
Modernism/modernity, 2023
The article examines early-Soviet figurations of cinema as a vaccine capable of inoculating worke... more The article examines early-Soviet figurations of cinema as a vaccine capable of inoculating workers with corporeal efficiency. Within this cultural fantasy, Charlie Chaplin was appropriated by the Soviet avant-garde to play an unlikely role of an expert in the theory and practice of labor. Tracing the cultural contexts of Chaplin's cameo in Iprit (1925), a science-fiction novel by Viktor Shklovsky and Vsevolod Ivanov, this article shows that the search for immunity from labor exhaustion opens wider vistas of the history of labor that run through the biocapital of slavery into the Soviet adoption of Taylorist practices of bodily standardization.
Modernism beyond the Human: Transnational Perspectives, ed. Alberto Godioli and Carmen van den Bergh, Brill, 2023
НЛО Новое Литературное Обозрение , 2019
Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde (University Press of Florida), 2019
Transcultural Studies: A Journal in Interdisciplinary Research 13:2 Special Issue: The Work (Labour) of Art: From Modernism’s Object to Postmodernism’s Punk Rock, 2017, 2017
In Viktor Shklovsky’s essay “Art as Device” habitual perception is described as a dangerous pract... more In Viktor Shklovsky’s essay “Art as Device” habitual perception is described as a dangerous practice, which renders one insensitive to the experiences of modernity. Importantly, the subjects’ automatized relationship with the surrounding world disrupts their ability to engage with objects. Rather than being experienced through the senses, the object is recognized through an epistemological (preconceived) framework. As a result, Shklovsky argues, “we do not see things, we merely recognize them by their primary characteristics. The object passes before us, as if it were prepackaged.” By making the usual strange Shklovsky’s technique of estrangement promises a relief from an alienating, consumerist experience of modernity, which “automatizes the object” instead of enabling perception: “in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.” In this article I trace the development of Shklovsky’s views on literature and the arts as an alternative way of experiencing objects in his writings during and after the Russian Revolution. I will pay particular attention to the relationship between things and words in Shklovsky’s writings produced during his exile in Berlin in 1923. The publication of the Berlin-based magazine Veshch/ Objet /Gegenstand in 1922, shortly before Shklovsky’s arrival, signals a rejection of both recognition and observation as passive consumerist practices. Instead, the manifesto published in the first issue of the magazine invites its readers to create new objects, which here is inseparable from the creation of new social formations. I will argue that Shklovsky’s 1923 writings provide a rethinking of the word “object” in society, literature and the arts. The function of art is not to “express what lies beyond words and images,” in other words, not to point to a referent that exists as a ‘real’ object, but rather to create a world “of independently existing things.”
From its first publication in 1923, Viktor Shklovsky's book Zoo, or Letters Not about Love has be... more From its first publication in 1923, Viktor Shklovsky's book Zoo, or Letters Not about Love has been discussed as a text that takes up a borderline position between literature and literary theory. The fact that the book was written and first published in Berlin ensured its place in studies of emigré literature concerned with geographic borders. In light of this twofold understanding of border as a boundary between genres and a category of literary cartographies, this article offers a rethinking of the notion of border in Shklovsky's early poetics. It suggests that the subject's geographic displacement (e.g., exile) provides a vantage point from which a reevaluation of established genres and discourses of textual production becomes possible. The experience of exile allows Shklovsky to challenge such categories as fiction (in literary and historical narratives) and nonfiction (both theory and autobiography). This becomes possible because in Zoo, or Letters Not about Love language is no longer presented as a medium of representation but rather as a means of recreating the writer's unstable literary and ideological position in postrevolutionary Russia and abroad. During his exile, which disrupted his contribution to the development of " the science of literature " undertaken by the formalist clique in Moscow and Petrograd, Shklovsky used writing as a way of constructing the Soviet writer's experience of emigré life. To further investigate the link between language and exile, the article draws parallels between Shklovsky's writings on the subject and Jacques Derrida's theories of writing, which link the inherent instability of language to its essential foreignness.
НЛО: Новое Литературное Обозрение, 2015
А с я Б у л а т о в а НЕУМЕСТНЫЙ МОДЕРНИЗМ ВИКТОРА ШКЛОВСКОГО: «ПИСЬМА НЕ О ЛЮБВИ» И ГРАНИЦЫ ЛИТЕ... more А с я Б у л а т о в а НЕУМЕСТНЫЙ МОДЕРНИЗМ ВИКТОРА ШКЛОВСКОГО: «ПИСЬМА НЕ О ЛЮБВИ» И ГРАНИЦЫ ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ В одном из первых отзывов на советскую публикацию «Zoo, или Писем не о любви» Юрий Тынянов заметил, что «Zoo»-это «вещь… на границе» 1. При этом Тынянов ссылается не на историю создания текста, не на то, что тот был написан за границей, в Берлине, во время вынужденной двухлетней эмиграции Шкловского в 1922-1923 годы, а на то, что неоднозначная жанровая реализация текста ставит под вопрос его принадлежность к художественному литературному дискурсу и, таким образом, выдвигает его на «край» литературы. С момента его перевода на английский язык в 1971 году «Zoo» стал неотъемлемой частью университетских междисциплинарных курсов и исследований об эмигрантском Берлине и литературе изгнания. Такое двойное понимание границы указывает на возможность разных аналитических перспектив, которые могут задействовать работы, посвященные книге. Наиболее показательными являются заглавия двух работ, вышедших в начале 1980-х годов. Книга «Границы жанра» Гэри Морсона анализирует «Zoo, или Письма не о любви» как один из случаев «переходных» или «пороговых» типов искусств («threshold arts») 2 , в то время как в работе «Пересечения гра-Ключевые слова: критическая теория, ссылка и изгнание, литература эмиграции, теория жанра, Виктор Шкловский, Жак Деррида
By focusing on the changing function of letter writing in modernist literature between 1910 and 1... more By focusing on the changing function of letter writing in modernist literature between 1910 and 1930, this article presents an attempt to cast a fresh cross-disciplinary vista over Russian Formalism and its intellectual and social contexts. The article examines the process of immersion of key Formalist concepts, such as genre and form, into an international community of ideas. My main focus here is an episode of modernist experimental exchange of textual messages that forms a multimedia dialogue sustained between Shklovsky and Jakobson throughout the 1920s.
Modernism/modernity, 2023
The article examines early-Soviet figurations of cinema as a vaccine capable of inoculating worke... more The article examines early-Soviet figurations of cinema as a vaccine capable of inoculating workers with corporeal efficiency. Within this cultural fantasy, Charlie Chaplin was appropriated by the Soviet avant-garde to play an unlikely role of an expert in the theory and practice of labor. Tracing the cultural contexts of Chaplin's cameo in Iprit (1925), a science-fiction novel by Viktor Shklovsky and Vsevolod Ivanov, this article shows that the search for immunity from labor exhaustion opens wider vistas of the history of labor that run through the biocapital of slavery into the Soviet adoption of Taylorist practices of bodily standardization.
Modernism beyond the Human: Transnational Perspectives, ed. Alberto Godioli and Carmen van den Bergh, Brill, 2023
НЛО Новое Литературное Обозрение , 2019
Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde (University Press of Florida), 2019
Transcultural Studies: A Journal in Interdisciplinary Research 13:2 Special Issue: The Work (Labour) of Art: From Modernism’s Object to Postmodernism’s Punk Rock, 2017, 2017
In Viktor Shklovsky’s essay “Art as Device” habitual perception is described as a dangerous pract... more In Viktor Shklovsky’s essay “Art as Device” habitual perception is described as a dangerous practice, which renders one insensitive to the experiences of modernity. Importantly, the subjects’ automatized relationship with the surrounding world disrupts their ability to engage with objects. Rather than being experienced through the senses, the object is recognized through an epistemological (preconceived) framework. As a result, Shklovsky argues, “we do not see things, we merely recognize them by their primary characteristics. The object passes before us, as if it were prepackaged.” By making the usual strange Shklovsky’s technique of estrangement promises a relief from an alienating, consumerist experience of modernity, which “automatizes the object” instead of enabling perception: “in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.” In this article I trace the development of Shklovsky’s views on literature and the arts as an alternative way of experiencing objects in his writings during and after the Russian Revolution. I will pay particular attention to the relationship between things and words in Shklovsky’s writings produced during his exile in Berlin in 1923. The publication of the Berlin-based magazine Veshch/ Objet /Gegenstand in 1922, shortly before Shklovsky’s arrival, signals a rejection of both recognition and observation as passive consumerist practices. Instead, the manifesto published in the first issue of the magazine invites its readers to create new objects, which here is inseparable from the creation of new social formations. I will argue that Shklovsky’s 1923 writings provide a rethinking of the word “object” in society, literature and the arts. The function of art is not to “express what lies beyond words and images,” in other words, not to point to a referent that exists as a ‘real’ object, but rather to create a world “of independently existing things.”
From its first publication in 1923, Viktor Shklovsky's book Zoo, or Letters Not about Love has be... more From its first publication in 1923, Viktor Shklovsky's book Zoo, or Letters Not about Love has been discussed as a text that takes up a borderline position between literature and literary theory. The fact that the book was written and first published in Berlin ensured its place in studies of emigré literature concerned with geographic borders. In light of this twofold understanding of border as a boundary between genres and a category of literary cartographies, this article offers a rethinking of the notion of border in Shklovsky's early poetics. It suggests that the subject's geographic displacement (e.g., exile) provides a vantage point from which a reevaluation of established genres and discourses of textual production becomes possible. The experience of exile allows Shklovsky to challenge such categories as fiction (in literary and historical narratives) and nonfiction (both theory and autobiography). This becomes possible because in Zoo, or Letters Not about Love language is no longer presented as a medium of representation but rather as a means of recreating the writer's unstable literary and ideological position in postrevolutionary Russia and abroad. During his exile, which disrupted his contribution to the development of " the science of literature " undertaken by the formalist clique in Moscow and Petrograd, Shklovsky used writing as a way of constructing the Soviet writer's experience of emigré life. To further investigate the link between language and exile, the article draws parallels between Shklovsky's writings on the subject and Jacques Derrida's theories of writing, which link the inherent instability of language to its essential foreignness.
НЛО: Новое Литературное Обозрение, 2015
А с я Б у л а т о в а НЕУМЕСТНЫЙ МОДЕРНИЗМ ВИКТОРА ШКЛОВСКОГО: «ПИСЬМА НЕ О ЛЮБВИ» И ГРАНИЦЫ ЛИТЕ... more А с я Б у л а т о в а НЕУМЕСТНЫЙ МОДЕРНИЗМ ВИКТОРА ШКЛОВСКОГО: «ПИСЬМА НЕ О ЛЮБВИ» И ГРАНИЦЫ ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ В одном из первых отзывов на советскую публикацию «Zoo, или Писем не о любви» Юрий Тынянов заметил, что «Zoo»-это «вещь… на границе» 1. При этом Тынянов ссылается не на историю создания текста, не на то, что тот был написан за границей, в Берлине, во время вынужденной двухлетней эмиграции Шкловского в 1922-1923 годы, а на то, что неоднозначная жанровая реализация текста ставит под вопрос его принадлежность к художественному литературному дискурсу и, таким образом, выдвигает его на «край» литературы. С момента его перевода на английский язык в 1971 году «Zoo» стал неотъемлемой частью университетских междисциплинарных курсов и исследований об эмигрантском Берлине и литературе изгнания. Такое двойное понимание границы указывает на возможность разных аналитических перспектив, которые могут задействовать работы, посвященные книге. Наиболее показательными являются заглавия двух работ, вышедших в начале 1980-х годов. Книга «Границы жанра» Гэри Морсона анализирует «Zoo, или Письма не о любви» как один из случаев «переходных» или «пороговых» типов искусств («threshold arts») 2 , в то время как в работе «Пересечения гра-Ключевые слова: критическая теория, ссылка и изгнание, литература эмиграции, теория жанра, Виктор Шкловский, Жак Деррида
By focusing on the changing function of letter writing in modernist literature between 1910 and 1... more By focusing on the changing function of letter writing in modernist literature between 1910 and 1930, this article presents an attempt to cast a fresh cross-disciplinary vista over Russian Formalism and its intellectual and social contexts. The article examines the process of immersion of key Formalist concepts, such as genre and form, into an international community of ideas. My main focus here is an episode of modernist experimental exchange of textual messages that forms a multimedia dialogue sustained between Shklovsky and Jakobson throughout the 1920s.