Indebted to Rupture Mediating between Eastern and Western [Post]Modernism

Transcription

1 POSTMODERNISM 9 Indebted to Rupture Mediating between Eastern and Western [Post]Modernism LJUDMILA BILKIĆ, UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH W hat splatters in[between] humanities Postmodernism is a slippery monster a monster that insists on its own dominance in all of culture (Lipovetsky, Znamia 217) and a vortex that sucks everything that it comes in contact with into its center (Bertens 4). The most widespread and active movement in contemporary [Russia] (Epstein, Origins 25), its name suggests that postmodernism is first and foremost a successor to modernism. In his work The Dialectics of Hyper From Modernism to Postmodernism, Mikhail Epstein supports this notion by claiming that Russian and Western postmodernism have common roots in their respective modernist heritage (Epstein, Dialectics 5). Furthermore, he clearly outlines that the analysis in this work rests on the interdependence of these two historical phenomena, or, more specifically, the modernist premises of postmodernism in light of postmodern perspectives on modernism. The interdependence may be two-fold, that is, on the one hand we have modernist precursors to postmodernism and on the other, the latter s assessment of modernism. However, in both instances the writer once again honors (what we perceive as) a strictly temporal succession. Whether one compares postmodernism to modernism or attempts to identify modernist characteristics in postmodernism, the very activity of comparing separates these two phenomena from one another because they are seen as two different entities. Epstein reinforces this by writing that [p]ostmodernism directs its sharpest criticism at modernism for the latter s adherence to the illusion of an ultimate truth, an absolute language, a new style, all of which were supposed to lead to the essential reality (5). He then jumps to a set of fleeting references to (what we perceive as) Western thinkers such as Plato, Renee Descartes, and most of all, the German 19th century philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Epstein states that postmodernism differentiates itself from modernism as an experiment in the self-

2 10 STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES enclosure of sign systems, of language folding in and upon itself (5). In other words, a reality beyond that of signs is vehemently criticized, according to Epstein, as the last in a series of illusions, a survival of the old metaphysics of presence. Furthermore, Epstein argues that in Hegel s writings (which exactly, the reader is left wondering), the Absolute Idea develops through its embodiment in increasingly concrete forms of being [it progresses] from the abstract to the concrete (13). If Hegel s thoughts proceed from the abstract to their specific living manifestations (13), how is this not a reality composed exactly of signs, an aspect that, as Epstein claims, postmodernism embraces? This type of question is not merely an analytical discrepancy it is representative of a larger theoretical struggle involving the genesis of postmodernism and more importantly, the ways in which one has attempted to both identify and define it up until now. In The Debate on Postmodernism, Hans Bertens mentions that from the very beginning, postmodernism led to a great deal of confusion because it was, and still is, many things at once (Bertens 4). Even at the earliest stages the term was applied at widely different levels of conceptualization (4), from experimental art of the 1950s and 1960s to several pop art movements that followed after the mid-1960s. However, Bertens claims that one thing remains certain: postmodernism refers to the state of the world after modernity, a state that we supposedly have entered at some point in the last twenty-five years (8). Furthermore, echoing Epstein s sentiment, Bertens underlines that the mid-1960s featured a massive revolt against the pretentiousness and the privileging of timeless, transcendent meaning that were associated with modernism (4). Two things have become apparent so far. First, the debate on postmodernism both values and accentuates (what we perceive as) a sequential order: modernism came first before postmodernism introduced a new way of perceiving and producing. Secondly, a short summary of the work of Western thinkers (such as G.W.F. Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer in the case of Epstein s writing) provides the foundation for not just widening the gap between the two movements, but also draws a wedge between the East and the West since the latter housed a core group of modernist philosophers that paved the way for rational and discursive that is, according to some scholars, pretentious modernist thinking. Another concrete example of the critical investment in division between the East and the West appears in The Total Art of Stalinism, in which Boris Groys elaborates on how each region approaches the notion of progress:

3 POSTMODERNISM 11 In the West, the march of progress is aimless one fashion succeeds another, one technological innovation replaces another, and so on. The consciousness that desires a goal, meaning, harmony is inspired to rebel against this progress. Yet the movement of time has resisted all rebellions and attempts to confer meaning upon, control, or transcend it. Since the social powers that be are the servants of this superhuman power of time, Western intellectuals have always for the most part felt they were opposed to them. In the Soviet Union, however, the situation is precisely the opposite. There the only way progress can occur is through an attempt to halt it to take the most radical Western fashion, radicalize it even further, and then claim overwhelming superiority to the West. (80) Here, Groys describes both the definition and realization of progress as being two very different processes in the East and the West. It seems that Western intellectuals have surrendered themselves to the superhuman power of time, and that is why they were and are still doomed to replace one movement, one ism, with another. If in the East the situation is precisely the opposite, then it is the intellectuals who are superhuman, because they have gotten the closest to harnessing the power of time by provoking and practicing complete destruction. Although Groys relies on the modernist behavior of the Soviet avant-garde in order to illustrate his claim, nevertheless, the actual argument is temporally undetermined. Due to the lack of periodic markers such as in Western modernism or in the East during a given century, we may isolate his statement and insert it into a discourse treating any period. Some of the banner-bearers of Russian postmodernism, for example, claim that cultural resuscitation can only occur if everything that currently exists is obliterated: in order to revive a corpse that is, an aesthetic corpse one needs to kill it again. The most important thing is to find a way (Rubinshtein 132). Evgeny Dobrenko briefly quotes the Russian poet Vladimir Druk presenting a similar sentiment: I wanted to construct a new world. But there was nothing else to break (Dobrenko 77). Once again, the oppositions seem clear: postmodernism followed modernism in such a way where it sought to obliterate what Bertens referred to as pretentiousness and the privileging of timeless and transcendent meaning. And yet, Epstein claims that postmodernism embraces a reality composed exactly of signs and that Hegel s modernist philosophical arguments proceed from the abstract to their specific living manifestations. Groys presents a territorial divide in which Western progress falls

4 12 STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES prey to time, and the East attempts to harness it by destroying any and all signifiers that may be used to chronologically ground a specific timeframe. Nevertheless, in the very same passage Groys still attributes to the West the visual of a march, something whose very purpose is an enddestination, a goal, an aim, and the signifier of progress, a notion that in and of itself suggests advancement towards something better. What s more, this aim, the goal assumed by the concept of progress, remains deliberately undefined in both the East and the West in Groys s passage and the very lack of it becomes a shared element in both regions. The common denominator of time, or better yet, our own perception of it, as signified by the critical opposition of modernism to postmodernism, and territorial divides, as represented by the East and the West, is where the postmodernist paradigm is at its strongest. It is here where relations between the past and the present are attenuated, creating a temporal elusiveness. And yet, both scholars and artists still rely on temporal markers to acknowledge, represent, and describe such a characteristic. Doing this is not a mistake because one needs something in order to escape from it or contradict it in the first place, but in the case of postmodernism, a more refined model than the available dialectic is necessary. If one of postmodernism s main characteristics is that it deliberately flattens time and the signifiers that accompany it, then the critical and theoretical accounts analyzing this movement should adopt that same method. More explicitly, in order to do justice to the trans-ideological, transtemporal, and trans-territorial concepts and to account for the aforementioned nuanced overlaps, the focus should not be placed strictly on modernism vs. postmodernism and East vs. West. Instead, the dominanta ruling, determining, and transforming these directions of thought should come in the form of a specific type of mediation that recognizes the elements, but flattens their signifying coordinates in order to accommodate shared nuances. In order to illustrate this, I will arbitrate in the form of a mediator such as the coyote and/or the raven, a position with potential that supersedes its roots in the Structuralist tradition of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Although my critical loyalties do not lie with Structuralism in this article, using this particular model will construct an inter-zone of critical thought that will allow for two things: one, the recognition of western and eastern [post]modernist paradoxes that greatly differ from one another and two, the detection of crucial elements of the same or similar paradoxes that both sides share. In conclusion, Jürgen Habermas s essay, Modernity: An Unfinished Project, offers understandings of modernity that may help to

5 POSTMODERNISM 13 reconcile these paradoxes. On the necessity of a meticulous third-party facilitator The coyote and/or the raven appeared as a theoretical tool for the first time in Lévi-Strauss s Structural Anthropology, in which the author presents a well-known, yet contradictory and (up until then) often overlooked set of findings in the study of mythology. On the one hand, a myth seems to contain no logic, a lack of continuity, and allows both the writer and reader to attribute random characteristics to any subject and thus find every conceivable relation (Lévi-Strauss 208). How do we then explain that myths throughout the world are so similar, addicted to duplication, triplication, or quadruplication of the same sequence (229)? Lévi-Strauss turns to Saussurean linguistics in order to first show that myths are language, possessing the langue, or the structural side that belongs to a reversible time, and parole, the statistical aspect that is temporally nonreversible. Myths are quite particular, however, in the sense that they use a third referent that combines the properties of langue and parole: [o]n the one hand, a myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place long ago. But what gives the myth an operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the present and the past as well as the future (209). This simultaneously historical and ahistorical structure may be thus viewed as an absolute entity on a third level, which, though it remains linguistic by nature, is nevertheless distinct from the other two (210). Lévi-Strauss goes on to argue that the construction of a myth always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward [its] resolution (224). It is this end-result that necessitates a type of repetition, i.e. the aforementioned duplication, triplication and so on, that inevitably reveals this structure. To illustrate this more clearly, I will turn to an example in North American mythology, where the role of a socalled trickster is assigned to the coyote or raven (see Table 1). The first opposition, life and death, presents the farthest opposing coordinates that occur in mythical writings. It is followed by a first triad that replaces the previous pair and simultaneously admits a third term, that of hunting, as a mediator. The polar opposites of the first triad and their mediator are then replaced by a new group of three, where the argument is as follows: [C]arrion-eating animals are like beasts of prey (they eat animal food), but they are also like food-plant producers (they do not kill what they eat). But it is also clear that herbivorous animals may be called first to act as mediators on the assumption that they are like

6 14 STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES Initial Pair First Triad Second Triad LIFE AGRICULTURE HERBIVOROUS ANIMALS CARRION-EATING ANIMALS (RAVEN; COYOTE) HUNTING BEASTS OF PREY WARFARE DEATH Table 1. collectors and gatherers (plant-food eaters), while they can be used as animal food though they are not themselves hunters. Thus we may have mediators of the first order, of the second order, and so on, where each term generates the next by a double process of opposition and correlation. (224-5) This type of a mediating structure of initial pair, first triad, second triad and so on fulfills both a synchronic (vertical / parole) and diachronic (horizontal / langue) arrangement. This in turn allows one to organize the oppositions and their mediating elements into diachronic sequences (rows) that are meant to be read synchronically (columns). Most importantly, this slated configuration (synchronic / diachronic) that surfaces through the process of repetition and add-ons of new triads is the fact that the slates are not identical, meaning that each triad is slightly different from the previous and subsequent groups of three. The slates were (and are) chosen almost at random, that is, by an individual who made a decision based on his/her deductive reasoning. This particular aspect, the fact that anyone can continue building upon the triads, causing each one of them to be slightly different yet compatible enough to form a pattern upon which most of us can agree, reflects the repetitive structure of the myth. It also provides a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it hap-

7 POSTMODERNISM 15 pens, the contradiction is real) (229). Last but not least, Strauss s structure is temporally independent, that is, it doesn t presuppose or require a strictly chronological beginning and end (apart from the real-time choosing of elements on part of the individual). There are two reasons for choosing a theoretical mediator such as the coyote and/or the raven for the discussion of postmodernism. This flexible, yet both synchronically and diachronically established set of positions incorporates a horizontal latticework of connections as much as it leaves room to acknowledge the vertical analyses of specific -isms. Secondly, the coyote and/or the raven as arbitrators do not provide a clear solution, or better yet, with each emerging triad it becomes clear that a full resolution or bridging between the opposites, whether they are characteristic or temporal, was not ever an option. This elusive and (quite possibly and once again deliberately) undefined aim affords individuals with the opportunity to subjectively choose and interpret parts of the triad while remaining in the chess-game with agreed-upon rules. In other words, the atemporal chess-game carries forth the sentiment of Groys s East where the notion of time is harnessed while the momentary choosing of a triad relies on established rules that form a Groysian Western ism. [Post]Modernism s triads The trickster s task is to take us back to modernism for a brief moment, because here we find beginnings of the triadic structure that carries over essential elements into the postmodernist years. In his essay Modernity: An Unfinished Project, Jürgen Habermas notes that those who view modernity as beginning in the late nineteenth century [only] look at it through the eyes of Baudelaire and the avant-garde (38). He goes on to emphasize that the word modern was used much earlier in the fifth century in order to delimit the present, which had become officially Christian, from the heathen and Roman past (Habermas 39). As the word has been recycled through the centuries that followed, the term modernity came to signify the result of a transition from the old to the new, and more importantly, those contributing to the modernist condition did not quite realize that they were doing so. As Habermas develops his discussion, however, another crucial element in his essay (at least in the discussion of postmodernism), is his assertion that the project of modernity is incomplete and that it shouldn t be easily disregarded. Viewing the purpose of art as emancipatory, he looks back to the Enlightenment as the original attempt to fuse art and life, or better yet, to explore and analyze the relationship between speaker, message, and recipient. In other words,

8 16 STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES the radical breaks that took place in postmodernism had their foundation in both the fifth-century and the Baudelairean modernist era, for it was during this time that the preoccupation with the meaning of art delved into exploration of the possible existence of a subconscious epicenter in the human mind. I will now turn to examples from the Russian Formalists and Western aesthetic theories in order to illustrate the triadic nature of their respective postmodernist doctrine. In the modernist East, Viktor Shklovskii expresses in his early theoretical writings his own dissatisfaction with the gap that human perception had locked in between the unconscious and the finished artistic product. He articulates a need for the resurrection of things (Shklovskii Resurrection 41) and pleas for the construction of a new language that would restore to man sensation of the world (46) by allowing the writer and/or artist to distance him/herself from the automatism of perception (Shklovskii, Art as Technique 22). Shklovskii s claims that previous abstractions of symbols are no longer enough and that the word has been and is continuously being exhausted and eroded were subsequently countered by Iurii Tynianov s statement of how every speech context has an assimilative power which forces a word to have only certain functions and colors them with the tone of activity in which they participate (Tynjanov 144). Tynianov sees the word as an empty vessel (136) with a basic semantic feature that is completed by secondary, contextual characteristics controlled by the individual making use of them, and so provides a temporary release of the word from its habitualization. Shklovskii s notion of [over]usage of a word is now turned on its head: the way a word may be used is the very same reason that refreshes it, prompting a type of inevitable ostranenie. Even more explicitly, while Shklovskii argues that human perception is a dangerous trap of which one must be aware in order to reach the saving forces of ostranenie, Tynianov claims that the components of that same trap, namely context, are the primary, if not the only, reason through which ostranenie is continuously achieved. Regardless of whose argument one chooses, it is safe to say that both Shklovskii and Tynianov recognize and struggle with isolating the various levels of the human subconscious and its functions. Formalist literary theory in the East launched a culture-wide inquiry into the human subconscious that reached its peak in the suprematist theories of the Russian avant-garde. Following the First World War and the October Revolution (during which the aforementioned texts of Shklovskii and Tynianov were being published), Russia reached a contradicting zero point, where, according to Andrei Belyi, the victory of

9 POSTMODERNISM 17 materialism resulted in the complete disappearance of all matter (qtd in Groys 20). The merciless destruction of the past provided the optimal carte blanche (or carte noire for that matter) for avant-gardists such as Kazimir Malevich and Velimir Khlebnikov, who feverishly sought to reconstruct the language of the subconscious with the intention of mastering it consciously (Groys 18). Malevich stated that the center of the unconscious is more accurate than the center of consciousness (Malevich 54) because all works of art trace their origin to a subconscious core that is present within an individual and that ultimately causes and/or motivates artistic expression. Because pure subconscious and transcendental activity is beyond any imaginable given system, it must be represented by the primordial form of the black square. Malevich also argued that a human being is originally unfree, because subconscious stimuli consistently gives rise to both the illusion of inner existence and illusion of external reality (57). If, in fact, one is unfree, then the allencompassing suprematist ideal of the Black Square is also an illusionary representative of the outside world. In other words, the artist, another human being, is [in]capable of controlling, modifying, or harmonizing these hidden stimuli, since [s/he cannot know] the laws of pure form (Groys 17, Malevich 59). Therefore, the manner in which Malevich decided to represent pure unconscious activity through the Black Square is a contradiction in and of itself, because it is still a representation that was produced by an individual s hands. At the same time, no matter how unreachable the subconscious may be, filtering it through conscious means is the only proof that it exists and that human synaesthetic processes are the only means that this proof can be manifested. This preoccupation with grasping the core or the primordial element of the subconscious is a type of conceptual integrity with which Western thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel engaged, in particular in their contributions to the study of aesthetics. The reader may argue that German postmodernist aesthetics are a far reach at this point, but it was Mikhail Epstein who stated that in terms of biological taxonomy, one could say that postmodernism is a class of aesthetic phenomena, while conceptualism is an order and sots-art a family (Epstein 26). In his Critique of Pure Reason, written in 1790, long before Shklovskii, Tynianov, and Malevich took turns adjusting their own [sub]conscious triads, Kant declared that the mind is an active constructor of our knowledge of the world and that

10 18 STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES one can never truly know the thing in itself that one is attempting to signify (Kant 57-9). In fact, he underlined that human beings perceive everything through a priori filters such as time and causality that aid us in perceiving things in themselves. This, in addition to other assertions in Kant s work, aided in the mediation between rationalism and empiricism that were prevalent approaches in German critical thought at the time. After Kant, G.W.F. Hegel gave a set of lectures in the 1820s that his students posthumously published between 1835 and In this work, Hegel pronounces art as an outdated component (Hegel 11) and underscores that the philosophy of art is a greater need in our day and age. Following this train of thought, Epstein claims that postmodernism reveals the absence of any reality other than the reality of ideas themselves (Epstein 4). According to Hegel, the development of reflection in our life invites us to intellectual consideration, and not for the sole purpose of creating art again in a modified or ism manner, but for knowing philosophically what art is. More importantly, it was in this collection of lecture notes that Hegel presents his infamous dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and sublation: where one achieves progress through the negation of the starting point, but does it in such a way where the destruction is part of mediation that while it eradicates an element, it simultaneously honors its presence (Hegel 54-55). Last but certainly not least, Hegel concludes Aesthetics with a close study of the classical, romantic, and symbolic forms of art however, what often goes unnoticed is that Hegel speaks of these three as styles, and not as fixed epochs that occurred and may only [have] occur[red] within demarcated artistic periods (567). This is crucial, for it sets the stage for the postmodernist tendency of the flattening of historical periods and mixing of styles. More broadly stated, Hegel s thesis / antithesis / sublation is a blueprint to which countless sets of signifiers and signifieds may be assigned. My final point in this discussion concerns Epstein s claim that postmodernism, like communism, is highly suspicious of any claim of free will, of the self-determination of human individuality (Epstein, Sots -Art 7). Written between 1814 and 1818, with an expanded edition published in 1844, Arthur Schopenhauer s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [The World as Will and Representation] claims that our world as we know it is representation and all of our thinking is dependent upon that single realization and not on what Kant termed as the things in themselves (Schopenhauer 1, 4-6, 38). In other words, the only a priori, according to Schopenhauer, is the fact that thinking as itself is dependent upon representation, and representation is dependent upon the will. Although the

11 POSTMODERNISM 19 writer in a way restates Kantian interrelationships of causality and time by stating that principles appear as cause of motivations and that we thus see in connections of cause and effect, one essential difference remains and therefore speaks to Epstein s assertion: the free will and selfdetermination of human individuality also does not exist, because der Wille in Schopenhauer-ian sense is an unrecognized form and allencompassing drive. The will is neither subject nor object, neither good nor evil the will, according to Schopenhauer, simply is, and all of the aforementioned signifiers such as subject, object, good, or bad all belong to the world of representation, which the will controls. In short, the will objectifies itself through us (through a priori) and as a result, our thoughts are object of the will. This type of collective subjectivity contradicts any type of human individuality because each individual in question is at the mercy of something that is incapable of succumbing to representation. Postmodernism, all-encompassing ostranenie Every piece of writing is an artificial isolation of a particular story. Or better yet, every piece of theoretical writing that addresses textuality is a modernist analysis and more than likely, an inevitably ensuing critique of existing cultural systems. The issue here is not the notion that a writer or a theorist will possibly quarantine a narrative or an argument to its demise this is inevitable, for we isolate as soon as we write, and it is welcomed, because it gives us something against which we can argue and thus develop our respective disciplines. Instead, the real danger occurs when signifiers such as every and is are used as (un)intentional and fundamental techniques that pervade humanist thought. What I mean to say here is that when it comes to specialization in a specific subject, particularly in the humanities, scholars are inevitably bound to remain within the chess game of their own field, choosing sides and misleadingly protecting what we have termed to be rightfully French, typically Soviet, originally German, and so on. By doing this, we carry forth principles that are not just particular to, but more importantly, are heuristically isolated from instrumental theories and findings in other disciplines that may possess shared characteristics. What I have presented here is by no means finite however, it does illustrate and offer a taste of what happens when one chooses to nurture analytical discrepancies with the same tools with which they were meant to be avoided. As I have discussed with the Russian Formalists and Western aesthetic theorists, both the East and the West were continuously preoccupied with addressing issues of social and technical processes of modernization. Consequently, the overbearing

12 20 STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES question of modernity in which human consciousness is interrogated developed into a particular type of wound or trauma from which neither region has successfully recovered. Furthermore, during the process of modernization, both first- and second-world societies underwent similar experiences of rupture that accompanied the negotiation of a new relationship to what they imagined to be an unconscious or subconscious epicenter in the human mind. I reiterate my initial observation that postmodernism is a slippery monster and therefore, a contradictory phenomenon. Because it protects itself with a theoretical as well as practiced self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs, it may do as it pleases, which includes undermining principles such as value, order, meaning, control, identity in summary, everything that Linda Hutcheon terms as the basic premises of bourgeois liberalism (13). Ultimately however, it is not postmodernism that reinstalls historical and characteristic contexts as significant and even determining, it is the postmodernists: individuals who chose and continue to choose to problematize the entire notion of historical knowledge. If, then, postmodernism is to live up to its true definition, it is absolutely crucial that both Eastern and Western postmodernist thought and scholarship utilize postmodernism itself as the coyote and/or raven. A successful postmodernist rupture must first come within the current writing approaches that isolate the East, West, and other geographic regions to their respective corners, for this is the only way that territorial, counterproductive division in the humanities may stop, and that the contradictions dancing around one another in triads may be amended. Works Cited Bertens, Hans. The Debate on Postmodernism. International Postmodernism Theory and Literary Practice. Eds. Bertens, Hans, and Douwe Fokkema. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, Print. Connor, Steven. Introduction. The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Ed. Steven Connor. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, Print. Dobrenko, Evgeny. Socialist Realism, a Postscriptum: Dmitri Prigov and the Aesthetic Limits of Sots-Art. Trans. Dianne Goldstaub. Endquote; Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style. Eds. Marina Balina, Nancy Condee, and Evgeny Dobrenko. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, Print. Epstein, Mikhail. Postmodernism, Communism, and Sots Art. Trans. John Meredig. Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style.

13 POSTMODERNISM 21 Eds. Balina, Marina, Nancy Condee, and Evgeny Dobrenko. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, Print The Origins and Meanings of Russian Postmodernism. Re-Entering the Sign: Articulating New Russian Culture. Eds. Ellen E. Berry and Anesa Miller-Pogacar. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, Print Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism. Trans. Charles Rougle. Princeton: Princeton U P, Print. Habermas, Jürgen. Modernity: an Unfinished Project. Habermas and the Unfinished Project on Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Ed. Maurizio Passerin D Entrèves. Cambridge: MIT Press, Print. Hegel, G.W.F. Aesthetics Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T.M. Knox. Clarendon Press: Oxford, Print. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, Print. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn. ForgottenBooks.com, Web. Kuritsyn, Viacheslav. Postmodernism: The New Primitive Culture. Trans. Kurt Shaw. Re-Entering the Sign: Articulating New Russian Culture. Eds. Ellen E. Berry and Anesa Miller-Pogacar. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, Print. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Structural Study of Myth. Ed. Claire Jacobson. Trans. Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, Print. Lipovetsky, Mark. Famous Last Words. Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos. Ed. Eliot Borenstein. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, Print Izzhivanie smerti: spetsifika russkogo postmodernizma. Znamia 8, Print. Malevich, Kazimir. The Non-Objective World. Trans. Howard Dearstyle. Chicago: P. Theobald, Print. Malpas, Simon. The Postmodern. London: Routledge, Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense. The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Group, Print. Rubinshtein, Lev. Life Everywhere. Catalogue of Comedic Novelties. Trans. Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky. New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, Print. Ruiter, Frans. Postmodernism in the German- and Dutch-Speaking Countries. International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, Print. Shklovsky, Viktor. Art as Technique. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, Print.

14 22 STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES ---. The Connection between Devices of Siuzhet Construction and General Stylistic Devices. Trans. Jane Knox. Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation. Eds. S. Bann and J.E. Bowlt. New York: Barnes and Noble, Print The Resurrection of the Word. Trans. Richard Sherwood. Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation. Eds. S. Bann and J. E. Bowlt. New York: Barnes and Noble, Print. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, Print. Tynianov, Jurij. The Meaning of the Word in Verse. Trans. M. E. Suino. Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Eds. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Cambridge: MIT Press, Print.