Edward Waysband | Babes-Bolyai University (original) (raw)
Papers by Edward Waysband
Word & Text: A Journal of Literary Studies & Linguistics, 2023
This is a review article of Vera J. Camden's edited Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoa... more This is a review article of Vera J. Camden's edited Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis, which engages critically with the contributors' main ideas and connects this volume with contemporary events.
Slavic Review, 2021
With its central image of the old masturbator in the Berlin “underground” restroom, Khodasevich&#... more With its central image of the old masturbator in the Berlin “underground” restroom, Khodasevich's poem “Under the Ground” (1923) both shocked and fascinated its readers. Khodasevich's intervention into two taboo themes in turn-of-the-century European culture—masturbation and public restrooms—is primarily self-reflexive, indicating his anxieties about the ambiguous place and status of a modernist poet and exploring the norms of poetic representation. The essay proposes to read “Under the Ground” as a site of contested and mutually commenting meanings among concerns about taboo sites of urban modernity, a self-reflexive vision of autoerotism, and aesthetic modernism with an emphasis on the shock effect. In analyzing Khodasevich's radicalization of his modernist poetics through the re-appropriation of these taboo themes, I also examine how current theorizations in the developing subfields of sexuality and urban studies that deal with masturbation and restrooms can contribut...
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2019
Providing the literary and philosophical comparative context of Petr Guber’s short story “Job Dul... more Providing the literary and philosophical comparative context of Petr Guber’s short story “Job Dulder (A Variation on the Old Theme)” (1923), the essay analyses a pre-Holocaust literary treatment of the Book of Job, enacting the collision of the traditional (Judaic) worldview of East European Jews with disastrous sides of modernity in Word War I and its aftermath. The paper juxtaposes two major actualizations of the Book of Job in modernist texts — (1) its appraisal in In Job Balances (1929) by Russian-Jewish existential philosopher Lev Shestov as a basis for his distinction between European rational philosophy and metaphysical belief and (2) a self-consciously anti-cathartic literary re-enactments of the Job story in Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and his Disciples (1922), Guber’s story, and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Job” (1970). The essay shows in what historical and ideological contexts these post-metaphysical subversions of the biblical proto-text are rooted. In these terms, “Job Dulder” presents an important variant of the Modernist thematization of the Job story. It situates the Jewish predicament between the hammer and the anvil of both Russian and Polish nationalisms during WWI. I argue that this representation of the precariousness of Russian-Polish-Jewish relations was generated by a specific historical and ideological situation in Soviet Russia in the early 1920s.
Slavic and East European Journal, 2018
In this essay, I analyze Maksim Gor’kii’s and Vladislav Khodasevich’s attitudes to Russian neo-pe... more In this essay, I analyze Maksim Gor’kii’s and Vladislav Khodasevich’s attitudes to Russian neo-peasant poetry as a formative aspect of their respective worldviews. Their approach represented one of the underlying factors in their short-lived émigré rapprochement that seemed so unexpected given their different life experiences and literary backgrounds. Both Gor’kii and Khodasevich considered Russian neo-peasant poetry as a literary expression of a peasant nationalist movement that endangered outcomes of the socialist revolution. Through an analysis of their respective articles dedicated to Sergei Esenin after the poet’s death, I also delineate the difference between Gor’kii’s and Khodasevich’s attitude to neo-peasant poetry. Khodasevich’s exposition portrayed Esenin’s poetry and self-representation as a cultural construct, a mixture of neo-Slavophilism and Modernist “life-creation.” Gor’kii, for his part, “naïvely” perpetuated Esenin’s essentialist peasant self-representation, incorporating it into his vision of the contemporary inexorable struggle between town and country.
Slavic and East European Journal, 2018
![Research paper thumbnail of “Русский писатель ‘вмешивается’ в польско-еврейский вопрос: неизвестное интервью Леонида Андреева.” [A Russian writer “interferes” in the Polish- Jewish question: An unknown interview of Leonid Andreev]. Russkaia literatura 4 (2014): 163–84.](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/54057428/thumbnails/1.jpg)
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Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2004
Russian Literature, 2016
This paper contextualizes Khodasevich's poem 'Slezy Rakhili' ('Rachel's Tears'; 1916) and his art... more This paper contextualizes Khodasevich's poem 'Slezy Rakhili' ('Rachel's Tears'; 1916) and his article 'Voina i poeziia' ('War and Poetry'; 1938) as his responses to World War I and to the Munich agreement, respectively. I contend that the First World War provided the impetus to Khodasevich for starting to write modernist poetry, in which he explicitly opposed " then " and " now " , a contrast that lies at the core of modernist consciousness. In Khodasevich's case, this acute awareness of a break with previous values had a personal quality, as the birth of his modernist poetics evolved out of a personal crisis in the wake of the suicide of his closest friend, Samuil Kissin, on 22 March 1916. Khodasevich's poem 'Slezy Rakhili' recapitulates macro-and micro-histories, referring to the broader issue of refugees and deportees and to Kissin's tragic end. 'Slezy Rakhili' is also a self-referential war poem as it reflects on current war poetry and questions whether poetry can adequately negotiate modernity in its most extreme form of a modern war. It is a conscious exploration of the contrast between " established things " and the new catastrophic reality of war and postwar Russia and Europe that makes Khodasevich a modernist poet and unites him with other modernist poets, like Vladimir Maiakovskii, despite their personal and literary animosities.
Articles by Edward Waysband
Word and Text, 2023
This is the Introduction to the latest volume of Word and Text. The volume contains the following... more This is the Introduction to the latest volume of Word and Text. The volume contains the following articles:
Introduction: Speculations of the Unconscious: Encounters between Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature and the Arts
Arleen Ionescu, Laurent Milesi and Edward Waysband
VISUAL ENCOUNTERS
Psychopoetic Encounters: Figurations of Difficulty
Mieke Bal
Darwin, Marker, Deleuze: The Expression of the Emotions and the Filmic Unconscious
Ruben Borg
LITERARY ENCOUNTERS
The Biological Unconscious, Memory and Identity in
Charles Fernyhough’s A Box of Birds
Maria Margaroni
Teletechnologies of Death and Mourning in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist
and Nicholas Royle’s Quilt
Zengjing Li
PHILOSOPHICAL ENCOUNTERS
Aesthetic Uses of Psychoanalysis in Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘Notes on Kafka’
Washington Morales-Maciel
Pnin’s Unforgettable Digressions:
Towards a Nabokovian Approach to the Unconscious
Zihao Liu
BIOGRAPHICAL ENCOUNTERS
Freud and the Topos of the Wandering Jew
Shuli Barzilai
The Memoirs and Journalism of Yakov Vladimirovich Veynshal:
Exploring the Interplay of Autobiography and Psychoanalysis
Anna Balestrieri
REVIEW ARTICLES
Psychoanalytic Readings in Troubled Times: Review of Camden Vera J.,
ed. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis
Edward Waysband
The Labyrinth of Kristeva’s Modernisms: Review of Maria Margaroni, ed. Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism
Darin Tenev
A Dialogue in the Realm of Afterthought: Review of Judy Gammelgaard,
Psychoanalysis After Freud: Memory, Mourning and Repetition
Simona Mitroiu
Word & Text: A Journal of Literary Studies & Linguistics, 2023
This is a review article of Vera J. Camden's edited Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoa... more This is a review article of Vera J. Camden's edited Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis, which engages critically with the contributors' main ideas and connects this volume with contemporary events.
Slavic Review, 2021
With its central image of the old masturbator in the Berlin “underground” restroom, Khodasevich&#... more With its central image of the old masturbator in the Berlin “underground” restroom, Khodasevich's poem “Under the Ground” (1923) both shocked and fascinated its readers. Khodasevich's intervention into two taboo themes in turn-of-the-century European culture—masturbation and public restrooms—is primarily self-reflexive, indicating his anxieties about the ambiguous place and status of a modernist poet and exploring the norms of poetic representation. The essay proposes to read “Under the Ground” as a site of contested and mutually commenting meanings among concerns about taboo sites of urban modernity, a self-reflexive vision of autoerotism, and aesthetic modernism with an emphasis on the shock effect. In analyzing Khodasevich's radicalization of his modernist poetics through the re-appropriation of these taboo themes, I also examine how current theorizations in the developing subfields of sexuality and urban studies that deal with masturbation and restrooms can contribut...
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2019
Providing the literary and philosophical comparative context of Petr Guber’s short story “Job Dul... more Providing the literary and philosophical comparative context of Petr Guber’s short story “Job Dulder (A Variation on the Old Theme)” (1923), the essay analyses a pre-Holocaust literary treatment of the Book of Job, enacting the collision of the traditional (Judaic) worldview of East European Jews with disastrous sides of modernity in Word War I and its aftermath. The paper juxtaposes two major actualizations of the Book of Job in modernist texts — (1) its appraisal in In Job Balances (1929) by Russian-Jewish existential philosopher Lev Shestov as a basis for his distinction between European rational philosophy and metaphysical belief and (2) a self-consciously anti-cathartic literary re-enactments of the Job story in Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and his Disciples (1922), Guber’s story, and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Job” (1970). The essay shows in what historical and ideological contexts these post-metaphysical subversions of the biblical proto-text are rooted. In these terms, “Job Dulder” presents an important variant of the Modernist thematization of the Job story. It situates the Jewish predicament between the hammer and the anvil of both Russian and Polish nationalisms during WWI. I argue that this representation of the precariousness of Russian-Polish-Jewish relations was generated by a specific historical and ideological situation in Soviet Russia in the early 1920s.
Slavic and East European Journal, 2018
In this essay, I analyze Maksim Gor’kii’s and Vladislav Khodasevich’s attitudes to Russian neo-pe... more In this essay, I analyze Maksim Gor’kii’s and Vladislav Khodasevich’s attitudes to Russian neo-peasant poetry as a formative aspect of their respective worldviews. Their approach represented one of the underlying factors in their short-lived émigré rapprochement that seemed so unexpected given their different life experiences and literary backgrounds. Both Gor’kii and Khodasevich considered Russian neo-peasant poetry as a literary expression of a peasant nationalist movement that endangered outcomes of the socialist revolution. Through an analysis of their respective articles dedicated to Sergei Esenin after the poet’s death, I also delineate the difference between Gor’kii’s and Khodasevich’s attitude to neo-peasant poetry. Khodasevich’s exposition portrayed Esenin’s poetry and self-representation as a cultural construct, a mixture of neo-Slavophilism and Modernist “life-creation.” Gor’kii, for his part, “naïvely” perpetuated Esenin’s essentialist peasant self-representation, incorporating it into his vision of the contemporary inexorable struggle between town and country.
Slavic and East European Journal, 2018
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2004
Russian Literature, 2016
This paper contextualizes Khodasevich's poem 'Slezy Rakhili' ('Rachel's Tears'; 1916) and his art... more This paper contextualizes Khodasevich's poem 'Slezy Rakhili' ('Rachel's Tears'; 1916) and his article 'Voina i poeziia' ('War and Poetry'; 1938) as his responses to World War I and to the Munich agreement, respectively. I contend that the First World War provided the impetus to Khodasevich for starting to write modernist poetry, in which he explicitly opposed " then " and " now " , a contrast that lies at the core of modernist consciousness. In Khodasevich's case, this acute awareness of a break with previous values had a personal quality, as the birth of his modernist poetics evolved out of a personal crisis in the wake of the suicide of his closest friend, Samuil Kissin, on 22 March 1916. Khodasevich's poem 'Slezy Rakhili' recapitulates macro-and micro-histories, referring to the broader issue of refugees and deportees and to Kissin's tragic end. 'Slezy Rakhili' is also a self-referential war poem as it reflects on current war poetry and questions whether poetry can adequately negotiate modernity in its most extreme form of a modern war. It is a conscious exploration of the contrast between " established things " and the new catastrophic reality of war and postwar Russia and Europe that makes Khodasevich a modernist poet and unites him with other modernist poets, like Vladimir Maiakovskii, despite their personal and literary animosities.
Word and Text, 2023
This is the Introduction to the latest volume of Word and Text. The volume contains the following... more This is the Introduction to the latest volume of Word and Text. The volume contains the following articles:
Introduction: Speculations of the Unconscious: Encounters between Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature and the Arts
Arleen Ionescu, Laurent Milesi and Edward Waysband
VISUAL ENCOUNTERS
Psychopoetic Encounters: Figurations of Difficulty
Mieke Bal
Darwin, Marker, Deleuze: The Expression of the Emotions and the Filmic Unconscious
Ruben Borg
LITERARY ENCOUNTERS
The Biological Unconscious, Memory and Identity in
Charles Fernyhough’s A Box of Birds
Maria Margaroni
Teletechnologies of Death and Mourning in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist
and Nicholas Royle’s Quilt
Zengjing Li
PHILOSOPHICAL ENCOUNTERS
Aesthetic Uses of Psychoanalysis in Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘Notes on Kafka’
Washington Morales-Maciel
Pnin’s Unforgettable Digressions:
Towards a Nabokovian Approach to the Unconscious
Zihao Liu
BIOGRAPHICAL ENCOUNTERS
Freud and the Topos of the Wandering Jew
Shuli Barzilai
The Memoirs and Journalism of Yakov Vladimirovich Veynshal:
Exploring the Interplay of Autobiography and Psychoanalysis
Anna Balestrieri
REVIEW ARTICLES
Psychoanalytic Readings in Troubled Times: Review of Camden Vera J.,
ed. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis
Edward Waysband
The Labyrinth of Kristeva’s Modernisms: Review of Maria Margaroni, ed. Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism
Darin Tenev
A Dialogue in the Realm of Afterthought: Review of Judy Gammelgaard,
Psychoanalysis After Freud: Memory, Mourning and Repetition
Simona Mitroiu