An innovative, interdisciplinary, incisive scholarly study remapping and redefining domains and dynamics of modernism, EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of modernism critically considers how geo-historically distant and disparate urban sites, concentrating Russian and Luso-Brazilian cultural dialogue and definition, give rise to peculiarly parallel anachronistic and alternative fictional forms. While comparatively reframing these literary traditions through an extensive survey of Russian and Brazilian literature, cartography, urban design and development, foregrounding innovative close readings of works by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bely, Almeida, Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Mário de Andrade, the book also redefines new constellations (eccentric, concentric, ex-centric) for understanding geo-cultural and generic dimensions of modernist and post-modern literature and theory.

An innovative, interdisciplinary, incisive scholarly study remapping and redefining domains and dynamics of modernism, EccentriCities: Writing in the Margins of Modernism critically considers how geo-historically distant and disparate urban sites, concentrating Russian and Luso-Brazilian cultural dialogue and definition, give rise to peculiarly parallel anachronistic and alternative fictional forms. While comparatively reframing these literary traditions through an extensive survey of Russian and Brazilian literature, cartography, urban design and development, foregrounding innovative close readings of works by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bely, Almeida, Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Mário de Andrade, the book also redefines new constellations (eccentric, concentric, ex-centric) for understanding geo-cultural and generic dimensions of modernist and post-modern literature and theory.

This innovative text examines the development of modernist writing in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna.

Plot elements such as adventure, travel to far-flung regions, the criminal underworld, and embezzlement schemes are not usually associated with Soviet literature, yet an entire body of work produced between the October Revolution and the Stalinist Great Terror was constructed around them. In Writing RoguesCassio de Oliveira sheds light on the picaresque and its marginal characters – rogues and storytellers – who populated the Soviet Union on paper and in real life. The picaresque afforded authors the means to articulate and reflect on the Soviet collective identity, a class-based utopia that rejected imperial power and attempted to deemphasize national allegiances. Combining new readings of canonical works with in-depth analysis of neglected texts, Writing Rogues explores the proliferation of characters left on the sidelines of the communist transition, including gangsters, con men, and petty thieves, many of them portrayed as ethnic minorities. The book engages with scholarship on Soviet subjectivity as well as classical picaresque literature in order to explain how the subversive rogue – such as Ilf and Petrov’s wildly popular cynic and schemer Ostap Bender – in the process of becoming a fully fledged Soviet citizen, came to expose and embody the contradictions of Soviet life itself. Writing Rogues enriches our understanding of how literature was called upon to participate in the construction of Soviet identity. It demonstrates that the Soviet picaresque resonated with individual citizens’ fears and aspirations as it recorded the country’s transformation into the first communist state.

Marcelline Block’s Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema breaks new ground in exploring feminist film theory. It is a wide-ranging collection (re)visiting important theoretical questions as well as offering close analyses of films produced in the United States, France, England, Belgium, and Russia. This anthology investigates exciting areas of research for critical inquiry into film and gender studies as well as feminist, queer, and postfeminist theories, and treats film texts from Marguerite Duras to 21st century horror films; from Agnès Varda’s 2007 installation at the Panthéon to the post-Soviet Russian filmmakers Aleksei Balabanov and Valerii Todorovskii; from Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof to Sofia Coppola’s postfeminist trilogy; from Chantal Akerman’s “transhistorical, transgressive and transgendered gaze” to the “quantum gaze” in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park; from Hitchcock’s “good-looking blondes” to the career-woman-in-peril thriller, among others. According to the semiotician Marshall Blonsky of the New School University in New York, “given the breadth of the editor’s choices, this volume makes a splendid contribution to feminist and cinematic fields, as well as cultural and media studies, postmodernism, and postfeminism. It lends readers ‘new eyes’ to view canonical and other film texts.” David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics, states that this anthology “should be required reading for students and scholars, among other readers interested in the interaction of cinema with contemporary culture.” Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship is prefaced by Jean-Michel Rabaté’s brilliant essay, “Mulvey was the First…”

Modes of address are forms of signification that we direct at living beings, things, and places, and they at us and at each other. Seeing is a form of address. So are speaking, singing, and painting. Initiating or responding to such calls, we participate in encounters with the world. Widely used yet less often examined in its own right, the notion of address cries out for analysis. Monique Roelofs offers a pathbreaking systematic model of the field of address and puts it to work in the arts, critical theory, and social life. She shows how address props up finely hewn modalities of relationality, agency, and normativity. Address exceeds a one-on-one pairing of cultural productions with their audiences. As ardently energizing tiny slippages and snippets as fueling larger impulses in the society, it activates and reaestheticizes registers of race, gender, class, coloniality, and cosmopolitanism. In readings of writers and artists ranging from Julio Cortázar to Jamaica Kincaid and from Martha Rosler to Pope.L, Roelofs demonstrates the centrality of address to freedom and a critical political aesthetics. Under the banner of a unified concept of address, Hume, Kant, and Foucault strike up conversations with Benjamin, Barthes, Althusser, Fanon, Anzaldúa, and Butler. Drawing on a wide array of artistic and theoretical sources and challenging disciplinary boundaries, the book illuminates address’s significance to cultural existence and to our reflexive aesthetic engagement in it. Keeping the reader on the lookout for flash fiction that pops up out of nowhere and for insurgent whisperings that take to the air, Arts of Address explores the aliveness of being alive.

Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. This second edition includes additional essays on the topic and a new introduction examining the most recent developments.