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Zusatztext Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva's book is the first ever comparative investigation of the major trends in Russian and American poetry of the late 20th century: Metarealism, Conceptualism, and Language School. It is a treasure-trove for everybody who loves contemporary poetry and strives to understand its complex language, experimental courage and international scope. Contrary to the common view, the author demonstrates that postmodern poetic systems are not aesthetically self-enclosed but have a deep referential value and relate to reality both positively (as the multitude of realities in Metarealism) and negatively (as the traumatic experience in Conceptualism). The book explores refined poetic imagery in a most precise way and introduces a number of new concepts emerging at the cutting edges of contemporary critical theory. Informationen zum Autor Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, USA. Vorwort Challenges the belief in the self-referential nature of postmodern writing and advances a reading of Russian and American postmodern poetry as a testimony to a traumatic post-industrial or post-totalitarian reality. Zusammenfassung This book challenges the belief in the purely linguistic nature of contemporary poetry and offers an interpretation of late twentieth-century Russian poetry as a testimony to the unforeseen annulment of communist reality and its overnight displacement by a completely unfathomable post-totalitarian order. Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva argues that, because of the sudden invalidation of a reality that had been largely seen as unattained and everlasting, this shift remained secluded from the mind and totally resistant to cognition, thus causing a collectively traumatic psychological experience. The book proceeds by inquiring into a school of contemporary American poetry that has been likewise read as cut off from reality. Executing a comparative analysis, Vassileva advances a new understanding of this poetry as a testimony to the overwhelming and traumatic impact of contemporary media, which have assailed the mind with far more signals than it can register, digest and furnish with semantic weight. Inhaltsverzeichnis INTRODUCTION: Witnessing History: The Voice of Postmodern PoetryPART 1Post-Communist Traumas, Post-Modernist Testimonies: Reference, History, and Memory in Russian Conceptualism and MetarealismI. The Problem of Reference in Russian Conceptualism1. The Origins and Meanings of Russian Conceptualism 2. The Striptease of Totalitarian Concepts: De-referencing the Communist Idiom3. Life on the Threshold: Ideological Manipulations of the 1980s4. Witnessing a Catastrophe: The Sudden Breakdown of Communism5. The Unforeseen Arrival of the Future. Displacements in a Post-Futurity Modus Vivendi 6. Traumatizing the Mind. Psychological Death of the Subject 7. Conceptualism, Corpora, and History. The Body-Aggregate and the Disarticulated Body 8. Referring to the Loss of Reference II. Parallel Developments in Other Post-Communist Literatures: A Bulgarian Interlude 1. Denuding and Revoking the Clichés of Communism 2. Surviving an Apocalypse: Testimonies to the Outbreak of Post-Communist Trauma3. Attaining the Impending. The Temporal and Psychological Displacements of the Post-Totalitarian Subject 4. Witnessing and Testimony. The Lethal Imagery of Post-Totalitarian Poetry 5. Corpora and History: The Mutilated and Dismembered Body III. Toward a Meta Understanding of Reality: The Problem of Reference in Russian Metarealist Poetry1. Russian Metarealism: The Expansion of Realism and Referentiality2. Victor Krivulin’s Kontsert po zaiavkam (A Pre-Commissioned Concert) and Novoe zrenie (New Vision) 3. A Poetry of the Threshold: Ol’ga Sedakova’s Vrata, Okna, Arki (Gateways, ...
