Mandel'shtam's poetics : a challenge to postmodernism / Elena Glazov-Corrigan.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Osip Mandel'shtam (1891-1938) is considered by many to have been the best Russian poet of his era. This book is the first attempt to describe in a comprehensive way Mandel'shtam's intellectual world and its effect on his evolution as a thinker.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Glazov-Corrigan (St. Thomas More College, Univ. of Saskatchewan) has admirably executed the task she set before herself: "to uncover the structure and consistency of Mandel'shtam's apparently impenetrable and disconnected theoretical discourse" by concentrating on the poet's essays on the poetic process. Not content to accept the received version of Mandel'shtam's theories, with its insistence on his "seeming lack of clarity and coherence," Glazov-Corrigan instead exposes his unity of vision in the ideas he presents "not as concepts, but as metaphors" through close analysis of his language and the chronology of the metamorphoses of those very metaphors. She also rejects the method of treating Mandel'shtam's essays as commentary on his poetry; rather, she focuses on the essays themselves, and in doing so reveals and resolves "a curious tension, and yet suggestive interplay, between Mandel'shtam's writings on poetry and the problematic and challenging field of postmodern poetics." She also shows how the poet's emphasis on absence rather than presence in the literary tradition anticipates postmodern theory. Simultaneously satisfying and provocative, this eminently lucid book should be required reading for every student of Mandel'shtam's theories of poetics and of alternatives to postmodern criticism--from the most sophisticated of undergraduates to the most seasoned of scholars. C. A. Rydel Grand Valley State University