Historical Poetics: An Online Resource
FUNDAMENTAL TEXTS
Some of the fundamental texts in the tradition of Historical Poetics are listed here.
Bibliographical information on publications pertaining to the Russian tradition of Historical Poetics can be found under Bibliography
HPWG 2010 mission statement
Historical Poetics – an approach to literary history and the history of culture pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838-1906) – has supplied the theoretical basis for the work of major 20th c. Russian literary theorists and historians, including Viktor Shklovsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Olga Freidenberg, and Mikhail Gasparov. Beyond Russia, Historical Poetics finds partial analogues in German “morphological poetics”, Erich Auerbach’s historical approach to literary style, and Fredric Jameson’s work on genre.
The members of the Historical Poetics Working Group pursue theoretical and historical work on literary form viewed sub specie of the history of culture. At the center of the HPWG’s interests are the phenomena that belong to the longue durée of literary/cultural history, such as the formation, evolution, and reception of devices, genres, styles, plot elements, conceptual categories, thematic constellations, and literary systems.
SPRING 2024 HPWG ZOOM MEETING
The group met on April 26, 2024, to discuss papers on a computational approach to liminality in Dostoevsky (Katherine Bowers and Kate Holland), magic and science in Anglophone 20th-century fiction (Jessica Merrill), and the transhistorical community of death penalty abolitionists (Boris Maslov).
SummER 2023 HPWG ZOOM MEETING
On August 8, 10am EST, HPWG will meet to discuss new work by group members: Michael Kunichika on theories of the origins of art, Boris Maslov on Potebnia and Veselovsky, Jessica Merrill on narrative metalesis. The meeting is chaired by Ilya Kliger.
Summer 2022 HPWG Zoom Meeting
On August 18 (5pm Paris time, 11am in NYC), HPWG will welcome two scholars who were displaced following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Tatiana Govenko (introduced by Kate Holland) will speak on the methodology of Veselovsky's early writings: "Замечания о методологии ранних работ Александра Веселовского"
Alexander Dmitriev (introduced by Michael Kunichika) will present his work on the Soviet literary scholar A. Beletskii: "Александр Белецкий между старой литературой и новой словесностью".
TRANshistoriCal COMMUNITIES WORKSHOP, 2/3/2024, AT UC BERKELEY
Further information under Berkeley 202(0/2 and4))
HistoricaL Poetics working Group Members
Email: historicalpoetics@gmail.com
Kate Holland (U. of Toronto)
Ilya Kliger (NYU)
Michael Kunichika (Amherst)
Boris Maslov (U. of Oslo);
Jessica Merrill (Columbia U.)
Victoria Somoff (Dartmouth)
RECENT WORK
Kliger, Ilya. Sovereign Fictions: Poetics and Politics in the Age of Russian Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024.
Kunichika, Michael. "The Skull of the Syntax: On Translating Eisenstein's Capital Diaries" [Editor's introduction] October 188 (2024): 21-24.
Kliger, Ilya. "Bakhtin's Scenarios of Selfhood: Modernism between Intersubjectivity and Transindividuality." In Understanding Bakhtin, Understanding Modernism, ed. Philippe Birgy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) 81-97.
Maslov, Boris and Tatiana Nikitina. "Remembering the Odyssey in the 21st century: spontaneous oral narratives by non-professional readers." JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 52.2 (2024) 169-203.
Maslov, Boris. "Poem/Song." Cambridge Companion to the Poem, ed. Sean Pryor (Cambridge UP, 2024) 49-66.
Maslov, Boris and Paulo do Nascimento Brito, “Aesthetic republicanism in Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony.” Russian Review 82 (2023) 232-247.
Merrill, Jessica. The Origins of Russian Literary Theory: Folklore, Philology, Form. Northwestern University Press, 2022.
Merrill, Jessica. "The North American Reception of Russian Formalism." In Central and Eastern European Literary Theory and the West, edited by Michał Mrugalski et al. (Walter de Gruyter, 2022), 289-306.
Maslov, Boris and Tatiana NIkitina “Rhyme in European Verse: A Case for Quantitative Historical Poetics.” Comparative Literature 71.2 (2019): 194-212.
Kunichika, Michael. "The Cave Paintings of Kapova: Toward a Socialist map of prehistory," RES: Anthropology and aesthetics 69-70: Writing Prehistory, eds. Stefanos Geroulanos and Maria Stavrinaki (Spring-Autumn, 2018): 118-135.
Katherine Bowers, Connor Doak and Kate Holland, eds. A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts. Academic Studies Press, 2018.
Kliger, Ilya. "Scenarios of Power in Turgenev’s First Love: Russian Realism and the Allegory of the State." Comparative Literature (2018) 70 (1): 25-45.
Maslov, Boris. “Lyric Universality.” Cambridge Companion to World Literature, ed. by B. Etherington and J. Zimbler. P. 133–148. Cambridge: CUP, 2018.
Special issue of Poetics Today 2017 (38.3) “Historical Poetics in Theory” edited by Ilya Kliger with contributions:
Kate Holland, Narrative Tradition on the Border: Alexander Veselovsky and Narrative Hybridity in the Age of World Literature, 429-451.
Ilya Kliger, Historical Poetics between Russia and the West: Toward a Nonlinear Model of Literary History and Social Ontology, 453-483.
Boris Maslov, How to Murder a Work of Art: Philology, Historical Poetics, and the Morphological Method, 485-518.
Jessica Merrill, Historical Poetics and Poetic Language: Rethinking the Concept of Autonomy for Modern Literary Theory, 519-548.
Earlier publications can be accessed under Further work on Historical Poetics
HPWG met at Historical Poetics@Berkeley Informal Colloquium on May 23, 2020. (Picture by Michael Kunichika) to discuss work-in-progress:
Ilya Kliger, Bakhtin’s Imaginaries of the Subject: from “Choral Support” to “Genre Memory”
Boris Maslov & Tatiana Nikitina, Songs in stories: formal heterogeneity in West African and European folktales
Jessica Merrill, Memorates: Corpus, Plot, Emplotment
Michael Kunichika, Specters of Empire: Early Soviet Cinema and the Representation of Race