Caryl Emerson is an American literary critic, slavist and translator. She is best known for her books and scholarly commentaries on the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. She has translated some of Bakhtin's most influential works, including Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin . Emerson was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at Princeton University from 1988 until her retirement in 2015. From 1980 to 1987 she was a professor of Russian Literature at Cornell.
Caryl Emerson grew up in Manhattan, Kansas, and Rochester, New York. Her father was a professor of theory and acoustics at the Eastman School of Music. Emerson completed her undergraduate studies at Cornell, majoring in Russian literature. She received her master's degrees in Russian studies and Russian language teaching from Harvard. She worked for some time as a secondary school teacher in New Jersey and then as a teacher of Russian area studies at Windham College in Vermont before completing a doctorate in comparative literature at the University of Texas. [1]
At graduate school Emerson encountered the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, who at that time was largely unknown in both his native (Soviet) Russia and the West. As a professor at Cornell, Emerson became a leading figure in the dissemination and explication of Bakhtin's work. Her translation of Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics in 1984 is still the only one used in English. The book is now considered a classic in Dostoevsky studies and literary theory, and has been influential in other disciplines such as philosophy and psychology. [2] During her time at Princeton Emerson wrote two books about Bakhtin, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (1990) and The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (1997), both of which are considered among the finest commentaries available on Bakhtin's life and work. [3] She has written extensively on other significant Russian cultural figures, notably Boris Godunov, Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Pushkin and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Though retired from formal teaching Emerson has continued to write, edit and translate in the field of Russian literature and Russian cultural studies.
Emerson has been widely recognized as one of the leading Slavists in the United States. In 2009 she received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies for her research on Krzhizhanovsky. She has won lifetime awards for “outstanding contributions to the field” from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (language and literature), and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (area studies), as well as awards for her individual books. In 1995, she was named the A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton. [4] In 2003 she became an Elected Member of the American Philosophical Society. [5]
The genre of Menippean satire is a form of satire, usually in prose, that is characterized by attacking mental attitudes rather than specific individuals or entities. It has been broadly described as a mixture of allegory, picaresque narrative, and satirical commentary. Other features found in Menippean satire are different forms of parody and mythological burlesque, a critique of the myths inherited from traditional culture, a rhapsodic nature, a fragmented narrative, the combination of many different targets, and the rapid moving between styles and points of view.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. His writings, on a variety of subjects, inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions and in disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and psychology. Although Bakhtin was active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, his distinctive position did not become well known until he was rediscovered by Russian scholars in the 1960s.
Dialogic refers to the use of conversation or shared dialogue to explore the meaning of something. The word dialogic relates to or is characterized by dialogue and its use. A dialogic is communication presented in the form of dialogue. Dialogic processes refer to implied meaning in words uttered by a speaker and interpreted by a listener. Dialogic works carry on a continual dialogue that includes interaction with previous information presented. The term is used to describe concepts in literary theory and analysis as well as in philosophy.
The term heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single "language". The term translates the Russian разноречие [raznorechie: literally, "varied-speechedness"], which was introduced by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in his 1934 paper Слово в романе [Slovo v romane], published in English as "Discourse in the Novel." The essay was published in English in the book The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, translated and edited by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson.
Carnivalesque is a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos. It originated as "carnival" in Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and was further developed in Rabelais and His World. For Bakhtin, "carnival" is deeply rooted in the human psyche on both the collective and individual level. Though historically complex and varied, it has over time worked out "an entire language of symbolic concretely sensuous forms" which express a unified "carnival sense of the world, permeating all its forms". This language, Bakhtin argues, cannot be adequately verbalized or translated into abstract concepts, but it is amenable to a transposition into an artistic language that resonates with its essential qualities: it can, in other words, be "transposed into the language of literature". Bakhtin calls this transposition the carnivalization of literature. Although he considers a number of literary forms and individual writers, it is François Rabelais, the French Renaissance author of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the 19th century Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, that he considers the primary exemplars of carnivalization in literature.
In literary theory and philosophy of language, the chronotope is how configurations of time and space are represented in language and discourse. The term was taken up by Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin who used it as a central element in his theory of meaning in language and literature. The term itself comes from the Russian xронотоп, which in turn is derived from the Greek χρόνος ('time') and τόπος ('space'); it thus can be literally translated as "time-space." Bakhtin developed the term in his 1937 essay "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel". Here Bakhtin showed how different literary genres operated with different configurations of time and space, which gave each genre its particular narrative character.
Logosphere is an adaptation of the concepts biosphere and noosphere: logosphere is derived from the interpretation of words' meanings, conceptualized through an abstract sphere.
Boris Godunov is a closet play by Alexander Pushkin. It was written in 1825, published in 1831, but not approved for performance by the censor until 1866. Its subject is the Russian ruler Boris Godunov, who reigned as Tsar from 1598 to 1605. It consists of 25 scenes and is written predominantly in blank verse.
The Maxim Gorky Literature Institute is an institution of higher education in Moscow. It is located at 25 Tverskoy Boulevard in central Moscow.
In literature, polyphony is a feature of narrative, which includes a diversity of simultaneous points of view and voices. Caryl Emerson describes it as "a decentered authorial stance that grants validity to all voices." The concept was introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin, using a metaphor based on the musical term polyphony.
In narratology, fabula equates to the thematic content of a narrative and syuzhet equates to the chronological structure of the events within the narrative. Vladimir Propp and Viktor Shklovsky originated the terminology as part of the Russian Formalism movement in the early 20th century. Narratologists have described fabula as "the raw material of a story", and syuzhet as "the way a story is organized".
Epic and Novel: Towards a Methodology for the Study of the Novel [Эпос и роман ] is an essay written by Mikhail Bakhtin in 1941 that compares the novel to the epic; it was one of the major literary theories of the twentieth century.
Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov was a Russian philologist and translator, renowned for his studies in classical philology and the history of versification, and a member of the informal Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1957 and worked at the Gorky Institute of World Literature, the Russian State University for the Humanities, and the Russian Language Institute in Moscow. In 1992 Gasparov was elected a full member of the Russian Academy of Science.
Skaz is a Russian oral form of narrative. The word comes from skazátʹ, "to tell", and is also related to such words as rasskaz, "short story" and skazka, "fairy tale". The speech makes use of dialect and slang in order to take on the persona of a particular character. The peculiar speech, however, is integrated into the surrounding narrative, and not presented in quotation marks. Skaz is not only a literary device, but is also used as an element in Russian monologue comedy.
Gary Saul Morson is an American literary critic and Slavist. He is particularly known for his scholarly work on the great Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Morson is Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Prior to this he was chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania for many years.
Ken Hirschkop is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and the author of several books about Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher, literary critic and scholar.
The themes in the writings of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, which consist of novels, novellas, short stories, essays, epistolary novels, poetry, spy fiction and suspense, include suicide, poverty, human manipulation, and morality. Dostoevsky was deeply Eastern Orthodox and religious themes are found throughout his works, especially in those written after his release from prison in 1854. His early works emphasised realism and naturalism, as well as social issues such as the differences between the poor and the rich. Elements of gothic fiction, romanticism, and satire can be found in his writings. Dostoyevsky was "an explorer of ideas", greatly affected by the sociopolitical events which occurred during his lifetime. After his release from prison his writing style moved away from what Apollon Grigoryev called the "sentimental naturalism" of his earlier works and became more concerned with the dramatization of psychological and philosophical themes.
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics is a book by the 20th century Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. It was originally published in 1929 in Leningrad under the title Problems of Dostoevsky's Creative Art but was re-published with significant additions under the new title in 1963 in Moscow. The book was first translated into English in 1973 by R. William Rotsel but this version is now out of print. Caryl Emerson's 1984 translation is the version now used for academic discussion in English.
The twentieth century Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote extensively on the concept of dialogue. Although Bakhtin's work took many different directions over the course of his life, dialogue always remained the "master key" to understanding his worldview. Bakhtin described the open-ended dialogue as "the single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life". In it "a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium."
The Dialogic Imagination is a book on the nature and development of novelistic prose, comprising four essays by the twentieth century Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. It was edited and translated into English by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, who gave the work its English title. Holquist and Emerson chose the essays from a collection of six essays by Bakhtin published in Moscow under the title Вопросы литературы и естетиҡи. According to Holquist, the unifying theme of the essays is "the novel and its relation to language." The title refers to the central place of the concept of dialogue in Bakhtin's theory of the novel. The novel, unlike other literary forms, embraces heterogeneity in discourse and meaning: it re-creates a reality that is based on the interactions of a variety of subjective consciousnesses and ways of thinking and speaking about the world. In this sense novelistic discourse undermines absolute or authoritative (monologic) language, which is revealed to be merely one form of ideological expression operating within an essentially intersubjective medium. Language, in Bakhtin's view, is inherently dialogic, and the novel is the literary genre that has the greatest capacity to artistically represent this reality. According to John Sturrock, for Bakhtin the novel is "the most complete and the most democratic of genres, coming as close as it is possible for an artform to come to capturing the multiplicity, richness and zest of life itself."