COMING SOON!

Translated from the Russian by Michael Eskin

ISBN 978-1-935830-51-1 (Softcover)
ISBN 978-1-935830-56-6 (eBook)
Publication Date: April, 17 2018

ABOUT THE BOOK AND AUTHOR

Written between 1916 and 1931 and available in English for the first time, Yakubinsky’s seminal essays afford us an unprecedented view of the history of modern literary and cultural theory. Addressing central questions of poetics and (socio)linguistics – such as what distinguishes poetry and literature from ordinary language?, where do poems come from?, what is our role in and contribution to the evolution of language?, how are language and politics intertwined? – their insights and criticisms are as fresh and apposite today as they were a century ago.

Russian linguist Lev Petrovich Yakubinsky (1892-1945) attended the University of Petersburg from 1909-15, during a period of academic renewal and challenge in Russian linguistics, which had hitherto been dominated by the neogrammarian study of language. The neogrammarians’ positivist and historicist approach was contested by a range of young scholars concerned with the functional and social diversity of language as an individual and collective activity. In this heated atmosphere of re-evaluation and change Yakubinsky, together with some of his fellow students and colleagues, such as Osip Brik and Viktor B. Shklovsky, founded, in 1916, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, thus initiating the movement that would subsequently go down in history under the moniker ‘Russian Formalism’ (without which, in turn, such schools of thought and criticism as structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstruction would be unthinkable).

COMING SOON!