Petrov, Petre Miltchov
(2007)
Laying Bare: The Fate of Authorship in Early Soviet Culture.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
The thesis examines the transition from post-revolutionary Soviet culture (1917-1928) to the culture of the Stalinsist period, arguing for a crucial transformation in the status of agency, subjecthood, and authorship between these two historical and cultural frames. I contend that Soviet culture has much to tell us about that momentous event of the twentieth century, the "death of author" or, more broadly, the "death of the subject"—an event that Western thought has illuminated from various perspectives (philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, structural anthropology, political economy, etc.). The analysis proceeds from a consideration of prominent literary and aesthetic theories of the 1910s and 1920s—Formalism, the sociological criticism of the "Pereverzev school," the artistic platforms of left avant-garde, the ideological positions of RAPP, etc.—in an attempt to present these often divergent currents of thought and praxis as homologous, as participating in the same "act": the cultural act of modernism. Characteristic of this act, I argue, is the attempt to transcend the dimension of the individual subjective and, in this very transcendence, institute an impersonal, suprahuman objectivity. The symbolic price for reaching this state of superhuman truth is the "instrumentalization" of human agency. The concrete result of the modernist act is Stalinism: a world in which the very production of truth and reality is coterminous with the ritualistic surrender of agency and autonomy. In the thesis' second part, I discuss socialist realism as a concrete instance of this surrender, seeking to demonstrate to what extent the position of the so-called "representing subject" in socialist realism is antinomic with the notion of authorship.
Share
| Citation/Export: |
|
| Social Networking: |
|
Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
| Creators | Email | Pitt Username | ORCID  |
|---|
| Petrov, Petre Miltchov | petrov@pitt.edu | PETROV | |
|
| ETD Committee: |
|
| Date: |
30 January 2007 |
| Date Type: |
Completion |
| Defense Date: |
5 December 2007 |
| Approval Date: |
30 January 2007 |
| Submission Date: |
8 December 2006 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Slavic Languages and Literatures |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
stalinism |
| Other ID: |
http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-12082006-013613/, etd-12082006-013613 |
| Date Deposited: |
10 Nov 2011 20:09 |
| Last Modified: |
15 Nov 2016 13:53 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/10192 |
Metrics
Monthly Views for the past 3 years
Plum Analytics
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
![[feed]](/images/feed-icon-32x32.png){kind=icon}