Alternative Pleasures, Alternative Compulsions: Reading Against Repetition in Russian Poetry and Prose

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

In describing literary repetition, we often employ the vocabulary of pleasure: the stable purity of iteration, the edifying satisfaction of "progress," and the gradual consummation of recognition. However, repetition is also a window into the uncanny and the grotesque, capable of generating ever-more complex affects and misprisions that can guide readers toward more challenging, even disorienting, terrain. When does this device produce an effect that is alienating rather than pleasurable? This panel seeks to expand the extant theorization of literary repetition by examining the formal, pragmatic, and performative circumstances that arise when devices repeat in manners quite incongruous with the rhythms and natural appetites that Peter Brooks suggests are inherent to the “pleasure of reading.” Gabriel Nussbaum re-reads Yuri Tynianov’s Wax Person as an ambitious representation of inertia that seeks to narrativize the Russian state’s repetitive, endless discourse. Zachary Deming examines instances of lyric apostrophe in V. G. Benediktov’s poetry, schematizing their rote, trite repetitions as processes of exhaustive Sadean permutation, expressive of a far more radically erotically contingent Romantic poetics than is typically ascribed to him. Rose FitzPatrick examines the thematic and lexical repetitions of Blok’s Rodina cycle in light of not only Nietzschean recurrence, but also the distinction between cyclical and progressive visions of Earth history, which offers insights into the shifting conceptions of “nature” at the fin de siècle. Treating repetitions as forms of neurotic compulsion, thanatotic appetite, and causal disruption, these papers explore the variform utilities of more complex, even unpleasant, “moments of recognition.”

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Michael Tobias Lerner, UC Berkeley

Papers

• Sadistic Stylistics: Entropy, Eros, and Epideixis in the Russian Biedermeier - Zachary J. Deming, Columbia U

• Repetition, Earth History, and Recurrence in the Rodina Cycle - Rose FitzPatrick, Yale U

• The Semantic Weight of History: Cultural Inertia in Tynianov's Wax Person - Gabriel Nussbaum, Princeton U

Discussant

• D. Brian Kim, U of Pennsylvania