An anxiety for influence: Shakespearean themes and images through the prism of Russian modernism (poetry of the early XX century).
Item
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Title
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An anxiety for influence: Shakespearean themes and images through the prism of Russian modernism (poetry of the early XX century).
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Identifier
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AAI9997124
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identifier
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9997124
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Creator
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Sukhanova, Ekaterina.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Daniel Gerould
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Date
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2001
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, Slavic and East European | Literature, English
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Abstract
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The present dissertation offers an attempt to fill the gap in substantive studies on Shakespeare's reception during the age of Russian modernism. Works of Russian modernist poets opened a qualitatively new stage in Russian appropriation of Shakespeare. This change in the reception of Shakespeare serves as a litmus-paper which helps to illustrate two major characteristics of Russian modernist poetry: an intense focus on inner experience and a desire to escape the "badger's hole" (an expression of Mandelstam) of one's concrete national and socio-historical surroundings.;The issue of tradition as both archaistic and innovative can be explored profitably via Yury Lotman's model of culture as a dialogue and his theory of textual functions, which has been chosen as the main analytical tool to study the mechanisms of the appropriation of Shakespearean text in Russian literature.;Within this theory, a literary text is seen as capable of entering into a complex relation with the cultural context and with readers; such a text may cease being a mere piece of information addressed by the transmitter to the recipient and become an independent conversational partner with capacity for memory and for creating new meanings. Through close textual analysis, the present dissertation aims at demonstrating that, within Russian cultural context, all functions of the Shakespearean text came to full actualization only at the time of literary modernism.;Themes and images taken from Shakespeare came to be used as parts of a new poetic language, inextricably belonging to the inner world of a twentieth-century author. The semiotic character of the Shakespearean text, brought to the foreground by Russian modernists, was conducive to generic (from the tragic to the lyric), cultural (from the social to the personal) and stylistic (from the plot to the word) transpositions taking place in Russian poetry of the period.;The Shakespearean text became capable of generating new meanings, effectively functioning as a participant in this poetical dialogue between two cultures.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
