Russian Literature | Open Access Articles | Digital Commons Network™

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, And Disgust In The Work Of Virginia Woolf And Zinaida Gippius, Yelizaveta Shapiro Sep 2023

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, And Disgust In The Work Of Virginia Woolf And Zinaida Gippius, Yelizaveta Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, and Disgust in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Zinaida Gippius examines how the discourses of degeneration, eugenics, and sexology shaped representations of women’s bodies in British and Russian modernist literature. Focusing on the writing of Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), I challenge the longstanding argument that both authors attempted to escape the material body by resorting to androgynous tropes. I argue that the material female body takes center stage in both Gippius’s and Woolf’s work and functions as a powerfully paradoxical entity: one that generates disgust and enables oppression while housing …

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Writing Dystopia: Zamyatin’S Writing Philosophy, Genre, And The Protagonist Of We, Kelly A. Gallagher May 2022

Writing Dystopia: Zamyatin’S Writing Philosophy, Genre, And The Protagonist Of We, Kelly A. Gallagher

College Honors Program

This thesis examines how Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) came to write one of the first literary dystopias. I argue that he designed dystopia in his novel We as a place that threatens the creation of what he considered “true literature,” in order to show why his conception of true literature is essential to the survival of the human spirit. The first chapter synthesizes Zamyatin’s critical essays and biographical details to reveal his writing philosophy, which I characterize as his belief that “creative revolution” sustains literature’s movement forward into the future. The second chapter explores why Zamyatin’s philosophy may have …

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Intertextuality, Aesthetics, And The Digital: Rediscovering Chekhov In Early British Modernism, Sam Jacob Jul 2019

Intertextuality, Aesthetics, And The Digital: Rediscovering Chekhov In Early British Modernism, Sam Jacob

Modernist Short Story Project

Mark Halliday’s poem, “Chekhov,” published in 1992, raises a simple yet profound question regarding the Russian playwright and author, Anton Chekhov: What do we get from Chekhov? Considering the present article’s particular focus, Halliday’s query may be used to ask how Chekhov influenced early modernist writers (circa 1900-1930) from the British literary context. However, when considering the amount of scholarly work devoted to this question, the initial simplicity of Halliday’s inquiry evaporates, giving way to a breadth of complexity, nuance, and ambiguity. Such ambiguity has led scholars attempting to trace the intertextual convergence between Chekhov and the early modernist writers …

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A Reader's Beheading: Nabokov's Invitation And Authorial Utopia, Aaron Botwick Jan 2015

A Reader's Beheading: Nabokov's Invitation And Authorial Utopia, Aaron Botwick

Publications and Research

“A Reader’s Beheading: Nabokov’s Invitation and Authorial Utopia” argues that Invitation to a Beheading polemically outlines Nabokov’s position on the relationship between reader and writer: in other words, that writing and reading are difficult, elite pursuits whose meanings should necessarily be available only to those willing to face and surmount the magician’s challenges. Narratively, it operates as a kind of roman à clef in which Cincinnatus C. follows a trajectory towards artistic freedom (or authorial utopia) where he is liberated from the constraints of poor readers—among them literalists and Freudians—while Nabokov, ever the unaccommodating creator, frustrates that progression with the …

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Review: Electric Salome, Loie Fuller's Performance Of Modernism, Tim Scholl Jan 2010