MLR, ., Gadamer in relation to Bahktin, is masterly, and mapped onto the contrast between the epic and the novel (pp. –). One of this study’s satisfactions is how many names it foregrounds for analysis: Emiliia Litauer and Medvedev, for instance. Chapter discusses Nikolai Marr’s analyses of language through ‘semantic paleontology’ (opposing Formalism, in its pursuit of history), and, in the same vein, examines Olʹga Freidenberg, Izrail FrankKameneyskii , and ‘paleontological morphology’, their study of how ‘plot’ emerged. As these, and other names are broached, Tihanov returns to contemplate how many of these modernist names were exiles, émigrés; their attempts to read and historicize culture happens from the margins, but with a mission to rethink, in the face of criticisms. One instance, in the form of fascinating debates contrasting Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s merits, closes the study, but not the reader’s interest. SWPS U W J T Interviews from the Edge: Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance. Ed. by M Y and J B. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. . vi+ pp. $. ISBN ––––. Interviews from the Edge comprises conversations with twenty-four writers, drawn from the New Orleans Review, a journal which began, in , ‘at a moment of great anxiety and great vitality but most importantly at a moment of great change’ (p. ). e book’s cover is striking. e title is painted in red and blue capitals on a white cardboard sign, the like of which has been seen at countless protests during the period the book encompasses, and which in the current political climate (also, arguably, a moment of anxiety, vitality, and change) feels potent. e sign itself, however, is positioned above a black background, so that it appears arrested in a void akin to the Sunken Place in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (). e tension between the clamorous placard and the sense of disconnectedness and frustration that arises from its dark surround anticipates the content of many of the ensuing conversations , as writers from Ernest J. Gaines to Sister Helen Prejean, Catharine Stimpson to Viet anh Nguyen, James Baldwin to Sheila Heti, discuss the possibilities and preclusions of writing as resistance. e cover reads like a shout, but the ideas about writing as resistance that the book contains are quietly offered. Mark Twain called the interview form ‘a dead carcass’, devoid of ‘warmth, grace, friendliness and charm’, but this book transcends any cadaverous tendencies the form may risk (e Complete Letters of Mark Twain, ed. by Albert Bigelow Paine (Teddington: Echo Library, ), p. ). roughout, as Avi Braverman writes, ‘everyone is a self and everyone is a character’ (p. ). In their considered intelligence the interviews function like Arthur Miller’s notion of writing as an ‘international signalling service, telling all who can read that wherever that distant blinker is shining live men of a common civilization’ (e Collected Essays of Arthur Miller, ed. by Matthew Roudané (New York: Bloomsbury, ), p. ). Interviews from the Edge goes further—we read the interviews, but we also, almost, hear them (or overhear them), multiple voices engaged in wide-ranging Reviews conversations about what it means to write, to read, and to resist. Nguyen observes that ‘the simple act of writing about people or events or cultures that are not oen talked about constitutes already a basic kind of activism’ (p. ). So too, Interviews suggests, does talking about them: it is an extended collaborative act of call and response , not just between the various interviewers and interviewees, but between the interviews themselves, as discursive filaments connect to reveal shared concerns, ideas, and influences, like ‘patterns in a tapestry whose many colorful threads exalt in running riot’ (Rita Dove, e Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (New York: Penguin, ), p. xxxi). Foremost among these threads is the consensus that writing is a force for good, if not necessarily for change (as Harold Jaffe argues, ‘even if planet earth were not seemingly in its death throes, writing itself would be useless without collective social action’ (p. )). But for Anaïs Nin, writing offers ‘the chance to make a world’ (p. ); for Gaines, ‘literature expresses man’s feelings and relationships much better than politics’ (p. ); for...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Jul 1, 2023
Marianne Stecher-Hansen 
Open Access