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Krystyna Pomorska (1928–1986), a noted specialist of Slavic literature and literary theory, is best known for her pioneering work in applying Roman Jakobson's theories of poetics to prose narratives. This collection draws together and makes accessible her writings over two decades (among them articles appearing in English for the first time), and treats a wide range of Slavic literary works, including Pushkin, Tolstoy, Pasternak, Chekov, and Solzhenitsyn, as well as examples from Polish and Ukrainian literature and folklore.
Forming an intellectual and methodological whole, these essays reveal Pomorska's commitment to the principles of Jakobsonian poetics, her consistent application of these basic theoretical concepts to the analysis of literary works, and her interest in the foundations and history of literary criticism. Pomorska explores problems in both poetics (of prose as well as poetry) and literary theory, especially the relationship between biography and myth.
In Krystyna Pomorska, structuralism found a most able practitioner, and Jakobson's oeuvre an authoritative exponent and interpreter. Her volume, a guidebook to a major strain in modern criticism, will be of great interest to a broad audience of literary theorists and students of Slavic literatures and literature in general.
List of contents
Editor's Preface vii
Introduction, by Henryk Baran xi
Poetics of Prose 1
Studies on Three Poets: Myth and Semiotics 81
Figures of Folklore 203
Structuralism and Semiotics: Profiles of the Founders Jakobsen and Trubetzkoy 231
Notes 291
References 305
Index 317
About the author
Krystyna Pomorska, at the time of her death, was Professor of Russian at MIT. She is the author and editor of numerous articles and books, including Russian Formalist Theory and Its Poetic Ambiance, Themes and Variations in Pasternak's Poetics and, with Roman Jakobson, Dialogues. Henryk Baran has written extensively on Russian literature in the Silver Age and is Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the State University of New York, Albany.
