SHARON LUBKEMANN ALLEN

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature State University of New York-Brockport

207C Hartwell Hall 350 Campus Drive Brockport, NY 14420

e-mail: slallen@brockport.edu

PROFESSIONAL POSITIONS:

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, SUNY-Brockport, 2005–present. COURSES: ENG112: College Comp.; HON112: Border Crossings: Reimag[in]ing Story & History, Fiction & Documentary; ENL165: Underground Consciousness; ENG223: Modern World Literature; ENG303: Intro. to Literary Analysis: Language, Landscape, Longing & Lies in Modern Literature; ENG314: Modern European Literature: Executions, Authorship & Authority; ENG317: Slavic Literature: Wit & Witness; ENG319: Comparative Literature: Crossings; ENG351: Urban Contexts & Urbane Consciousness in Modern Fiction & Film; ENG363: Writing in Exile; ENG409: Postmodernism in World Literature: Theory of the Novel & the Novel’s Play with Theory; ENG/WMS442/542: Sex & the City: Contemporary Women Writers & Cosmopolitanism; ENG/WMS442/542: Women & Memoir: Re-membering (his)story in Art & Literature; ENL448/548: Idiots, Fools, & Madmen: Dialogues with Dostoevsky in Fiction; ENL/FLM 463/563: International Film: (Re)visionary Soviet & Post-Soviet Filmmakers; ENG472: Senior Seminar in Contemporary European Literature: Re-mapping Cultural Memory; ENL478/578: Critical Approaches; ENG604: World Modernisms; ENG625: Tolstoy & Dostoevsky: Ethics & Aesthetics

Fulbright Fellow, Programa em Teoria da Literatura & Departamento de Estudos Anglísticos, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, 2009-2010.

Idiots, Fools, & Madmen: Dialogues with Dostoevsky in World Literature, Film & Theory

Writing in Exile: Transgression, Transculturation, Translation, Translingualism & the Tasks of Literature

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Humanities Forum, University of Pennsylvania, 2004–2005. Dream & Nightmare in Modern Fiction & Film

Lecturer/AI, Departments of Comparative Literature, Humanities, Romance Languages and Literature, Slavic Languages & Literature, Visual Arts, & Princeton Writing Program, Princeton University, 1999-2004.

Modern European Writers, AI, 1999; Graduate Seminar on Teaching Literature, Co-Instructor, 2001, 2003; Madness & Modern Fiction, Lecturer, Princeton Writing Program, 2002–2003; Dirty Words: Satire, Slander, and Society, AI, 2003; Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, AI, 2004; Cinema from WWII to the Present, AI, 2004.

Lecturer, Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, Rutgers University, Newark. Modern Brazilian Literature: City, Carnival, and Consciousness, Instructor, fall 2003.

EDUCATION

Princeton University, Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, May 2004.

École Normale Supérieure and Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, France, 2000–2001.

Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon, Portugal, research funded by Princeton University grants, summers 1999, 2001.

Petersburg State University, International Dostoevsky Museum, and Institute of Russian Literature–Pushkinskii Dom, independent research, graduate seminar, and internship, Russia, summer 1998.

University of Dallas. M.A. in English and Comparative Literature and Theory, 1996.

Millersville University, advanced graduate work in sculpture, 1992–1993.

Research and work in fine arts, funded by a Yale University fellowship, Ukraine and Russia, 1991–1992.

Yale University, B.A. in Soviet and East European Studies, 1991.

Bryn Mawr College/American Council of Teachers of Russian, Moscow, Russia, summer 1989.

Preparatory education in Lisbon, Portugal and NJ, USA. FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS, AND HONORS

Provost’s Post-tenure Research Fellowship, SUNY-Brockport, 2012-2013.

Fulbright Scholars Fellowship, University of Lisbon, 2009-2010.

Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Leave, NY/United University Professions & SUNY-Brockport, spring 2010.

Scholarly Incentive Grants, Individual Development Grants, & Sponsored Program Incentive Awards in support of research and conference presentations, SUNY-Brockport & UUP, 2005-2011.

Discretionary salary increases for exceptional scholarship, SUNY-Brockport, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010.

Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 2004–2005.

Princeton University Fellowship, Department of Comparative Literature, 1997–2002.

Dean’s Fund for Scholarly Travel, 1998-2004.

Princeton Graduate School Summer Stipends for Dissertation Research, Paris and Lisbon, 2000, 2001.

Council on Regional Studies Grants & Mary Cross Fellowship, St. Petersburg & Lisbon, summers 1998, 1999.

University of Dallas Fellowship for Graduate Studies, 1994–1996.

Millersville University Fellowship, 1992.

H. H. Rice Fellowship, Yale University, research and work in the fine arts, Ukraine & Russia, 1991–1992. PUBLICATIONS, PRESENTATIONS, & PROJECTS:

Book Projects:

EccentriCities: Writing in the Margins of Modernism, St. Petersburg to Rio. Manchester University Press, 2013. 384 pages, 40 maps, lithographs, paintings and photographs. (Abstract appended)

Paris Palimpsest: Reading between Lines of Astonished Memory, Writing on the Wall & Execution of the Writer.

Interdisciplinary study surveying literary and visual citytexts; manuscript in advanced stages. Re-mapping Cultural Memory: Relocations and Resonances in Contemporary Slavic and European Fiction, Film & Theory. Manuscript in early stages of development.

Peer-reviewed articles:

“Recasting the Republic Past/Present: Liudmila Ulitskaia & Lídia Jorge,” Iberoslavica, 2012; Portuguese version, Letras com Vida 4, 2012.

“Dissent, Despair, & the Limits of Dialogue & Dialogism in Dos Passos’ Urban/e U.S.A.,” forthcoming from the Centro Cultural John Dos Passos, 2013.

“Postmodern Portuguese and Russian Re-Mappings of Cultural Memory: Intertextual, Transhistorical, Transcultural Dialogue,” Cumplicidades Comparatistas: Origens, Influencias, Resistencias/VI Congresso Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Literatura Comparada, December 2009.

“Chantal Akerman’s Cinematic Transgressions: Transhistorical and Transcultural Transpositions, Translingualism, and the Transgendering of the Cinematic Gaze.” Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Post World War II Cinema. Ed. Marcelline Block. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.

“Navigating Past/Present: Modes of Mapping Cultural Memory in Contemporary Russian and Luso-Brazilian Literature”/“Kартографические дислокации культурной памяти в современной русской, португальской, и бразильской литературе,” American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists, Ohrid, 2008. Vol. 2: Literature. Ed. David Bethea. Bloomington: Slavica, 2008. 1-24.

“Unorthodox Confession, Orthodox Conscience: Aesthetic Authority in the Underground,” Studies in East European Thought: Dostoevsky’s Significance for Philosophy and Theology, ed. Ed. R. Bird, 59: 1-2 (June 2007) 65-85.

“Makine’s Testament: Transnationalism, Translation, and the Transformation of the Novel,” Review of Literatures of the European Union, Traduzione Tradizione? Paths in the European Polysystem, 4 (July 2006) 167-186.

“From the Grotesque to the Sublime: Logos and the Purgatorial Landscape of Mertvie dushi and Master i Margarita,” Slavic and East European Journal, 47: 1 (Spring 2003) 45-76.

“Reflection/Refraction of the Dying Light: Narrative Vision in Nineteenth-century Russian and French Fiction,”

Comparative Literature, 54: 1 (winter 2002) 2-22.

“Dispossessed Sons and Displaced Meaning in Faulkner’s Modern Cosmos,” Mississippi Quarterly, 50: 3 (Summer 1997) 427-443.

reviews:

Lotman’s World, dir. Adne Nelk, review essay forthcoming in Film and History, 2013.

Val Vinokur’s The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, 52: 3-4 (Sept.-Dec. 2010).

Sarah J. Young’s Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative: Reading, Narrating, Scripting. Slavic and East European Journal, 51: 1 (2007) 151-153.

Julian Graffy’s Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” Slavic and East European Journal, 46: 2 (Summer 2002) 392-394.

Françoise Genevray’s George Sand et ses contemporains russes, Revue Canadienne de Littérature, 30 (2003).

Michel Aucouturier’s Le Realisme socialiste, Slavic and East European Journal, 44 : 1 (Spring 2000) 140-142.

translations:

Natalie Ferrand, “Toward a Database of Novelistic Topoi,” The Novel: Volume 2: Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti, Princeton University Press, 2006. 324-45.

Luiz Costa Lima, “The Novel and the Control of the Imagination,” The Novel: Volume 1. 37-68.

José Luiz Passos, “Macunaíma,” in The Novel: Volume 2. 896-905.

Roberto Schwarz, “Machado’s Turnabout: Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas,” in The Novel: Volume 1. 816-40.

Sylvie Thorel Cailleteau, “La poésie de la médiocrité” and “Vénus décomposée, lecture de Nana,” in The Novel: Volume 2. 64-94, 541-47.

PEER-REVIEWED CONFERENCE PAPERS & SESSIONS

“Comparative Verbal and Visual Cartographies: Re-mappings of Cultural Memory in Contemporary Lusophone Literature and Art by Antunes, Agualusa, Jorge, Vieira da Silva, Geiger and Varejão,” atelier: “Géocritique, littérature comparée et au-delà,” International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA/AILC), Paris, July 2013.

“Recasting Authorship and Authority: Refractory Writers in Reflexive Russian and Lusophone Works,” atelier: “Raconter la théorie dans le roman,” ICLA/AILC, Sorbonne, Paris, July 2013. “Daughters: Gendered and Generic Reconfigurations in Petrushevskaia and Jorge (Comparative Notes on Doubling, Dispossession, Deviance, Dissembling, Dialogue and Dialogism),” International conference on Iberian and Slavonic Cultures in Contact and Comparison: Interfaces within Gender Studies, University of Lisbon, Portugal, May 2013. “Re-routing Cultural Memory in the Paris Metro,” seminar on “Mapping the City: Minority Narratives and the Multiethnic Metropolis,” American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Toronto, April 2013.

(Re)visionary Reflections: Khrzhanovsky’s A Room & a Half and Nelk’s Lotman’s World”/“Animated Film in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union,” Modern Language Association (MLA), Boston, Jan. 2013.

“Reimagining Story & History: Photographic Images in Post-modern Novels,” 7th International Conference of the Portuguese Comparative Literature Association (APLC), Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal, Dec. 2012.

Invited discussant, “(Wo)manning the Can(n)on: Creation, Procreation, and Destruction,” Association for the Study of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), Washington, DC, November 2011.

“Re-casting Russian Writers: Geographical Relocations, Generic Reconfigurations: Tarkovsky, Khrzhanovsky,” American Assoc. of Teachers of Slavic & East European Languages (AATSEEL), Los Angeles, January 2011.

“Tightropes: Transcultural Renegotiations of Portuguese Cultural Identity in Contemporary Literature,” upcoming presentation at the 7th International Conference of the American Portuguese Studies Association (APSA): Trans-Atlantic Exchanges, Brown University, October 2010.

“Recasting the Republic Past/Present: Liudmila Ulitskaia & Lídia Jorge,” COMPARES: 4th Intnt’l Conference of Iberian & Slavonic Cultures in Contact & Comparison: ResPublica(s), Univ. of Lisbon, May 2010.

“Estar é Ser: Pessoa, Place, & Plural Authorship.” Invited response to Richard Zenith. Whose Words: Alternate Theories of Authorship in Portuguese and American Poetry in the 20th Century. Univ. of Lisbon, May 2010.

“Transnational Reconfigurations of Cultural Memory in Contemporary American Literature,” Encontros do Instituto de Cultura Americana, Univ. of Lisbon, March 2010.

“Dissent, Despair, & the Limits of Dialogue & Dialogism in Dos Passos’ Urban/e U.S.A.,” III Symposium John Dos Passos: Modernity and Intercultural Dialogues, Madeira, January 2010.

“Transnational Cinema: Relocation, Re-casting, Reimag(in)ing of Cultural Memory,” seminar organizer & chair, American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Harvard Univ., Cambridge, March 2009.

“Post-exilic Returns & Post-modern Revisions of E. Europe: Kieslowski, Akerman, Kogut,” ACLA, Mar. 2009.

“Postmodern Portuguese and Russian Re-mappings of Cultural Memory,”APLC, Univ. do Minho, Portugal, Nov. 2008.

“Navigating Past/Present: Modes of Mapping Cultural Memory in Contemporary Russian and Luso-Brazilian Literature,” International Slavist’s Association, Ohrid, Macedonia, 2008.

“Petrushevskaia and Ulitskaia: The Refusal of Nostalgia and Rewriting of History in Contemporary Russian Women’s Writing,” Modern Language Association (MLA), Chicago, December 2007.

“EccentriCities: Writing in the Margins of Modernism. St. Petersburg’s and Rio de Janeiro’s Scribblers,” International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), Rio de Janeiro, July 2007.

“The Deterritorialization of Underground Discourse.” International Dostoevsky Soc., Budapest, Aug. 2007.

“The Wandering Portico: Classical Structures in Transnational Russian Fiction & Film—Brodsky, Tarkovsky, Makine, Ulitskaya,” AATSEEL, Dec. 2006.

“Hero, History, and Story.” Panel Chair, AATSEEL, December 2006.

“Lisbon Story: Redefining an Urban/e Cinema,” Film and History Conference: The Documentary Tradition,

Dallas, TX, November 8-12, 2006.

“Metamorphosis across Cultural Margins: Translation, Transculturation, and the Transformation of Critical Discourse and Literary Form,” seminar organizer & chair, ACLA, Princeton University, March 2006.

“Pathological Consciousness, Parasitic Prose, and the Metamorphosis of Narrative Fiction: From Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Machado de Assis to Lispector, Verrissimo, & Pelevin,” ACLA, 2006.

“Mapping Petersburg, 1900–1920: Literary Publications: SIRIN and the Symbolist Press.” AATSEEL, Washington, DC, December 2005.

“Laughter in Dostoevsky’s Early Fictions.” MLA, Washington, DC, December 2005.

“Four Short Takes: Brodsky, Tarkovsky, Pelevin, and Sokurov on Translation, Transposition, and Cultural Memory.” Conference of the American Association of Slavic Studies (AAASS), Salt Lake City, November 2005.

“Hallucinated Cities on the Margins of European Modernism: from Bely’s Petersburg to Mário de Andrade’s São Paulo.” ACLA, Penn State, March 2005.

“Eccentric Consciousness in Exile: Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia,” AATSEEL, Philadelphia, Dec. 2004.

“Writing in the Margins: Lispector and Petrushevskaia, Lins and Pelevin,” Slavic Colloquium, University of Pennsylvania, November 2004.

“Writing in the Madhouse of Brazilian and Russian Literature: Lins and Pelevin,” APSA, Univ. of Maryland, October 2004.

“Underground Pessoa: Dialogues with Dostoevsky in Modern Luso-Brazilian Literature,” XIIth International Dostoevsky Society Symposium, Geneva, Switzerland, September 2004.

“EccentriCities: Disease, Dissent, and Dialogue in the ‘Petersburg Text,” SEEJ panel, “Disease in Slavic Literatures,” MLA, San Diego, December 2003.

Organizer and Chair of a Special Session: “Memory and Madness in the Eccentric Citytext: The Poetics of Petersburg, Rio and Prague,” MLA, New York, December 2002.

“The Urban(e) Structure of Narrative Consciousness: Petersburg and Rio as Schizophrenic Subtexts in Fictions by Gogol and Machado de Assis,” MLA, New York, December 2002.

“Petrushevskaia’s Vremia Noch’: Moscow Underground,” AATSEEL, New York, December 2002.

“Schizophrenia and the Petersburg Text,” AATSEEL, December 2001.

“Andreï Makine’s Testament: Re-membering the Novel,” annual conference of the Southern Comparative Literature Association (SCLA), Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, September 2001.

“The Refractive Gaze Facing Death: Fantastical Visions in Russian and French Realist Fiction,” Conference on Slavic Literature, Yale University, New Haven, CT, February 2000.

“Verbal Regeneration in Gogol’s Mertvie dushi & Bulgakov’s Master i Margarita,” Mid-Atl. AAASS, 2000.

“Liminal Laughter in Tolstoy’s Fictions,” AATSEEL, Chicago, December 1999.

“The Poetics of Infernal Circling in Blok’s Vozmezdie, Echoes of Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale,” AATSEEL, San Francisco, December 1998.

“Generic Digressions in Gogol’s Revisor,” Princeton University, May 1998.

“The Play of Light and Shadow in Tatiana Tolstaia’s Milaia Shura,” Princeton University, Dec. 1997. INVITED TEACHING PRESENTATIONS & LECTURES

“Doubletakes in Recent Slavic and Lusophone Women’s Works. Reframing the documentary photograph: a comparative reading of geo-culturally and generically (re)visionary fictions and films,” CLEPUL, Univ. of Lisbon, Dec. 2013.

“Mainstream & Margin in Contemporary American Literature: Digressions on the Wandering Jew” ULICES: 2nd

Lisbon Forum on English & American Studies: New Horizons, Univ. of Lisbon, May 2010.

“Re-framing Literary Inquiry in Comparative Literature Courses: Transculturation, Translation, & Theory,” SUNY-Fredonia, 27 April 2009.

“Transcultural Reading,” English Faculty Teaching Workshop “Traduttore, Tradittore: Issues in Teaching Literature in Translation,” English Faculty Teaching & Learning Workshop, SUNY–Brockport, March 2009.

“Displacement, Defamiliarization, and Other Advantages of International Film: Tarkovsky in Dialogue with Modern Fiction.” EFTL: “Reading an Image: Film & Literature,” SUNY-Brockport, March 2007.

ACADEMIC International Association of Slavists (IAS), member of the Commission for Iberian-Slavonic

SERVICE Comparative Research, 2010-present. Centro de Literaturas e Culturas Lusófonas e Europeias (CLEPUL), Faculdade de Letras,

Universidade de Lisboa, research affiliate & advisory board member, 2010-present. Suny Teacher Education Network (S-TEN/C-TEN), College at Brockport Committee

member, spring 2013-present. Womens and Gender Studies Advisory Board, SUNY-Brockport, 2008-present. English Department Curriculum Committee, SUNY-Brockport, 2006–2009, 2010-2011, Chair, 2013-2014. English Department Search Committees in World Literature, Modernist British Literature,

& Film Studies, SUNY-Brockport, 2005–2006, 2006-2007, 2008-2009, 2011-2012. Graduate Fellow, Rockefeller College, Princeton University, 2003–2004. Graduate Liaison Committee, Comparative Literature Department, Princeton University,

1997–2000, 2001–2003.

Scholarly associations:

Modern Language Association (MLA) Modernist Studies Association (MSA) American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) Portuguese Comparative Literature Association (APLC) American Portuguese Studies Association (APSA) International Association of Slavists (IAS) American Association for Teachers of Slavic Languages and Literatures (AATSEEL) Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) International Dostoevsky Society (IDS) Centro de Literaturas e Culturas Lusófonas e Europeias (CLEPUL), Research Group 5: Iberian & Slavic Literatures and Cultures, Universidade de Lisboa

CompaRes: Society for Iberian Slavonic Studies Instituto de Cultura Americana, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa College Art Association (CAA) Faculty Learning Community on Integrative Learning & Global Perspectives, SUNY- Brockport, 2013-2014

LANGUAGES Native Portuguese and English

Professional fluency in Russian and French ARTS Exhibitions of drawings, sculpture, black-and-white photography.

Recent and upcoming exhibitions at Different Path Gallery, Brockport, NY: Reconfiguring the Nude, Feb. 2013; Brockport Artist’s Guild: current work, April 2013.

REFERENCES António Feijó, Dean of the Faculdade de Letras and Professor in the Program in Literary

Theory, Universidade de Lisboa. (ant.feijo@gmail.com) Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour, III, University Professor and Chair of Slavic Languages

and Comparative Literature, Princeton University. (cemerson@princeton.edu) K. David Jackson, Professor of Portuguese, Yale University. (k.jackson@yale.edu) Maria DiBattista, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Chair,

Committee for Film Studies, Princeton University. (mariadib@princeton.edu) Onésimo Almeida, Professor of Portuguese, Brown University. Ralph Black, Director of the Writers Forum and Professor of Creative Writing, Department

of English, State University of New York, Brockport (rwblack@brockport.edu) P. Adams Sitney, Chair, Film Studies, Creative Workshop, Princeton University.

(padams@princeton.edu) Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923, Chair and Professor of English and

Comparative Literature, Princeton University. (mwood@princeton.edu)

Abstract for book forthcoming from Manchester University Press, Nov/Dec 2013

(Machado de Assis/Dostoevsky, Rio de Janeiro/St. Petersburg)

EccentriCities: Writing in the Margins of Modernism,

St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro

Sharon Lubkemann Allen EccentriCities: Writing in the Margins of Modernism, St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro critically considers how geo-historically distant and disparate urban sites, concentrating Russian and Luso-Brazilian cultural dialogue and definition, give rise to peculiarly parallel fictional forms. Rethinking the reflective relationship between eccentric capitols and recursive, reflexive, refractive, and refractory writing in the margins of paradoxically marginal and central cities and citytexts, this project relocates and redefines both domain and dynamics of modernist narrative consciousness. It argues, as point of departure, that conventional Euro-centric mappings and models of an urban/e modernism fail to account for the peculiar dimensions of self-consciously eccentric modernist art and architecture, urban (re)design, and literary discourse. Exploring the development of discrete capitals and cultural discourses, critically cast on opposing margins of Europe and on the edges of vast empires, EccentriCities discovers intriguing confluences between the stylized, schizophrenic construction of eccentric urban landscapes and urbane literary traditions. Tilted through the city and citytext into consciousness, EccentriCities develops, on the other hand, a “slanted line” of criticism, such as that invoked by Nabokov as essential to understanding the peculiar eccentricity and gravity, as much stylistic and psychological as socio-political, of Gogol’s Petersburg tales. That is, this work investigates a more complex interplay between urban context and urbane narrative consciousness than that suggested by earlier studies of the “modernist city,” in order to offer incisive and innovative readings of Russian and Brazilian narratives as well as new constellations (eccentric, concentric, ex-centric) for understanding geo- cultural and generic dimensions of modernist and post-modern literature.

EccentriCities reflects a recent interest in the geo-cultural specificity and complexity of the “citytext” represented by such works as Pericles Lewis’s Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, Buckler’s Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape, Matich’s forthcoming Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, Harding’s Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism, Brookler’s Geographies of Modernism, and Alter’s Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel. However, it offers new critical frameworks to survey and link sites, cross-examined only schematically by seminal critics such as Schwarz. Engaging recent elucidating studies of influence and reception by Bruno Gomide and tracing relevant textual trajectories and intertextual dialogues, EccentriCities focuses rather on the implications of cultural and textual correspondences for literary and cultural theory.

Foregrounding fictions by nineteenth-century writers including Gogol and Dostoevsky, Almeida and Machado de Assis, as well as recognized modernist masterpieces by writers such as Bely and Mário de Andrade, this project recasts modernism through historically as well as geographically liminal narratives. More essentially, it develops a distinct, dynamic mode of re-mapping the citytext against the city, by focusing on reflexive fictions. These works, anxiously composed in St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro, then also São Paulo and an increasingly ex-centric Moscow and Lisbon, directly concern writing in the margins of both modern city and text. They self-consciously contrast with the concentric citytexts of Paris or London that have provided the core for most theoretical models of an urban/e modern narrative. Critically reconsidering correspondences between urban contexts and urbane

modes of modernist consciousness, EccentriCities cross-examines diverse pathologies (paranoid projection, manic schizophrenia, and pathological forms of memory) that inform the (re)design of what Lotman and others in the Tartu school of cultural semiotics differentiate as concentric and eccentric cities and citytexts. If the ruptures characteristic of a concentric modernist reconstruction of city and self lie primarily along temporal, historical fault lines, contending with the problems of memory and social mobility, eccentric texts compound memory and social gaps with the social gaffs of a “copied” and colonial culture, with geo-cultural distance and difference, anticipating problematics broached by post-structuralist, post-colonial, and post-modernist theory.

Eccentricities looks both forward to and back through layered lenses of cultural and literary theory developed by Simmel, Benjamin, Foucault, Felman, Deleuze and Guattari, Bakhtin, Todorov, Lachmann, Lotman, Boym, Epstein, Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, and Schwarz—in order to redefine geographical, historical, psychological and aesthetic domains, dimensions, and dynamics of modernist narrative. The originality of the study lies in its interdisciplinary approach to the modernist text (brought into new focus through layered critical lenses of cultural semiotics, formalist and post-structuralist theories of discourse, urban history); in its historical scope (redefining modernism through apparently anachronistic texts, reconsidering recognized modernist texts in relation to more marginal literary lines, and tracing eccentric lines through contemporary national and transnational literatures); and especially in its cultural range (connecting Luso-Brazilian and Slavic literatures not only through a study of direct and mutual influences, but, more essentially, by charting structural and cultural correspondences). Theoretically framed, historically informed, visually engaged with urban and cultural construction (including relevant maps and images), the work’s central claims are delivered through new readings of renowned literary texts and recuperations of less disseminated narratives, elucidating not only their seminal roles in Slavic and Latin American cultural discourse, but larger relevance in world literature and theory. The book promises to be of broad interest to Slavic, Luso-Brazilian, transnational, modernist and comparative literary scholars and theorists, as well as to a general, interdisciplinary reader with an interest in narrative form, urban studies, cultural theory, or these particular geo-historical contexts.

Mapping the Project:

The first of four sections redefines schematic scholarship linking the cityscape and modernist narrative consciousness by reconsidering the interrelation of city, text, and consciousness in terms of Bakhtin’s theories of speech genre and dialogue, chronotope and carnival, Lotman’s cultural ruptures and more complex conception of the semiosphere, and Schwarz’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s displaced or deterritorialized discourse. Moving beyond Bakhtin’s delimitation of disinterested polyphonic discourse and dialogue informed by the urban thresholds concentrated in the realist novel, this section charts creative capacities of disease, digression, dissembling, dissent, and anxious dialogue in modernist discourse. It complicates formal categories of metaphor and metonymy by re-conceptualizing modernist narrative construction in terms of more dynamic modalities of memory and madness corresponding to concentric and eccentric modes of modern cultural and urban construction.

Elaborating the relationship between eccentric cities, self-conscious modernist narrative, and modern cultural theory, the second part of the manuscript first comparatively surveys the schizophrenic design and development of St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro (examining cultural reorientations and reflexivity in cartographic and other visual representations of the city as well as historical record and literary remappings). While the first chapter looks at literal construction of the city, the second chapter of this section critically recasts the relationship between literal and literary landscapes. This section contends that these cities, positioned on the edges of Europe and vast empires, looking towards Paris and London as well as historical capitals of Moscow or Lisbon, manifest in their immediate design the schizophrenia, aphasia, and other crises characteristic of the modern city. It examines similar complications of Russian and Luso-Brazilian cultural discourse shaped by an anxious relation not only to European cultural “centers” but also to other cultural margins, resulting in concomitant or collapsed colonized, colonizing, and post-colonial identities. These discrete eccentric contexts generate fictions that challenge traditional historical, geographical, and structural definitions of modernism. If modernist consciousness is in certain senses gamin de Paris and if post-modernist bricolage recalls Baudelaire’s chiffonier, even in these eccentric contexts in which anachronistic modernist and post-modern texts are critical replies to French and other European models, writers such as Gogol and Dostoevsky, Almeida and Machado de Assis create fictions whose European contemporaries or progeny come only with Proust and Woolf, Kafka, Pessoa, and Joyce (each already ex-centric or eccentric, exploring socio- political, sexual and gendered, and generic limits). Tracing urban and literary contexts for and consequences of classic Russian and Brazilian authors’ works, this section traces the contours of an urban/e modernism first fully

realized in the marginal scribbling of deviant copy clerks, digressing on the page and in the city. The third section of the manuscript focuses on close critical re-examinations of the refractory narrators of Gogol’s Notes of a Madman [Записки сумасшедшего], Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground [Записки из подполья], and Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas [Memórias Posthumas de Brás Cubas]—more or less literally “underground” narrators for whom the retreat into a corner of the city instigates the writing of the narrative. Variously confronting death sentences in the city and in the text, these reflexive narrators recover urban/e ground in the recursive turns of the modern sentence, opening inward, through verbal play informed by memory and madness. Their narratives foreground the correspondence between literally finalizing and literarily open-ended sentences. The alienation of these fictive narrators in the city generates the authorial capacity “for hearing and understanding all voices immediately and simultaneously,” an urbane capacity that, according to Bakhtin, is characteristic of the novelistic genre of modernity. At the same time, their alienation also excludes them, in Bakhtin’s philosophy of discourse and in the traditionally Realist frameworks in terms of which their fictions are read, from the dialogic engagement necessary to the full realization of fictive or authorial consciousness. Their self- interrogating “understanding,” pathological re-presentations of the other, and paranoid dialogues with the reader call into question the authenticity and authority of polyphonic or dialogic creation within a single consciousness. Reconsidering these as modernist narratives, I argue that Bakhtin misreads the creative capacities and limits of “underground” consciousness. As close literary analysis, this section offers significantly new, critically informed readings of seminal masterpieces. By cross-examining underground texts belonging to different cities, it also develops concrete models of eccentric modernism.

The final section of the manuscript examines the extensions of the eccentric line in the “hallucinated cities” of recognized modernist Russian and Luso-Brazilian writers, including Bely, Mário de Andrade, and, with a detour to an ex-centric Lisbon, Pessoa. But it also surveys less “mainstream marginal writing” and the dynamic of continual displacement in these eccentric traditions, corresponding in both cultural contexts to the displacement of cultural capital and the deterritorialization of writers through internal and external exile, historical and social disruption. Finally, I argue for an encompassing eccentric line, connecting complicated schizophrenic constructions of cultural memory by writers such as Brodsky, Rawet, Lispector and Lins, Pelevin and Petrushevskaia, Saramago and Antunes.

Sample images included in the work:

ECCENTRICITIES: WRITING IN THE MARGINS OF MODERNISM,

St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro

Sharon Lubkemann Allen

CONTENTS

List of figures Preface Introduction

I Eccentricity and modernity

1 Urban contexts, urbane consciousness and the eccentric slant of modernisms 1.1 RETRACING URBAN/E DIMENSIONS OF THE MODERNIST NOVEL

1.2 RECONFIGURING MODERNIST REFLECTION: FRACTURED MIRRORS, REFRACTORY NARRATORS

1.3 Re-mapping modernism: eccentric vs. concentric design and dynamics 1.4 REFRAMING THE MODERNIST SENTENCE: CONCENTRIC MEMORY, ECCENTRIC MADNESS, AND DIALOGISM

2 ECCENTRIC CITIES AND CITYTEXTS: TRANSPOSITION, TRANSLATION, AND TRANSFORMATIONS OF AUTHORITY AND

AUTHORSHIP

2.1 Eccentric domains: St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro i Form: schizophrenic designs

ii Foundations: displaced capitals 2.2 Eccentric dynamics in Russian and Brazilian literature: displacement, digression, dialogue, dissembling,

and dissent II Eccentric narrative consciousness

3 Gogol’s open prospects: digressive copy clerks 3.1 ‘Parallel lines that do meet when the necessary ripple is there’: texts, cultural contexts, criticism i Logos: travestying Peter ii Cosmos: transcribing and transforming the Petersburg text 3.2 Reading between the lines: authority in ‘The Overcoat’ (dialogues between author, hero, and narrator) 3.3 Intertextual lines: crossings on ‘Nevsky Prospekt’ (intertextual dialogues) 3.4 Realignments: critique and creativity in ‘Notes of a Madman’ (contradiction and dialogue) 4 Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s unending undergrounds: dead men writing 4.1 Towards a theory of underground laughter: carnival, degeneracy, degeneration, and generation 4.2 Generation/s of eccentrics i Formation of underground aesthetics: eccentrics in marginocentric capitals; subtexts, contexts, pretexts, and early texts ii Transformation of the underground: eccentricity in later novels 4.3 Generation in the underground text: Notes from Underground and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas i Romancing the reader ii Refractory and refractive rambling in the city iii Gambling on drunken discourse, winning an afterlife

III An encompassing eccentric line

5 Hallucinated cities 5.1 Evolving eccentricities: revolutionary Russian modernisms and Brazilian ‘modernismo’ 5.2 Eccentricity in the ex-centric city and in exile: Russian, Luso-Brazilian, and transnational post-modernism Postscript: theory of the novel and the eccentric novel’s early play with theory

Notes Bibliography

An early reader’s report on the book: My evaluation of Sharon Lubkemann Allen’s manuscript, “EccentriCities: Writing in the Margins of St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro,” is a resoundingly positive assessment given the impressive breadth of this study’s critical research, in- depth analysis, cross-cultural treatment, and theoretical originality. This work, which represents a major contribution to the fields of Slavic and Luso-Brazilian literatures and cultures as well as to the discipline of Comparative Literature and urban literature, also constitutes one of the most incisive presentations of dislocated (eccentric) literary voices within the contexts of modernist and post-modernist consciousness. This study offers the reader a singular reading of narratives of displacement, dissidence, transculturalism, disapora, alterity, exile, polyphony, and self-consciousness via the formative and dialogic dynamics of literary cityscapes in which multiplicities of the self relate to the digressive, refracted, ambiguous, and “underground” narratives emerging from the St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro socio- historical and literary experiences. Furthermore, Allen’s work contributes to an uncommon understanding of the literatures connected to these cities by juxtaposing two extremely different cultures and languages in order to demonstrate how their social histories and cultural consciousness are uncannily similar in their evocation of what she labels an eccentric line of writing.

The subjects within the confines of these cities are forced to confront the self as other and in so doing remap for the reader a broader understanding of the intricacies of the urban terrain via a Bakhtinian “dialogic” reading of the “monstrous” nature of the city and the self’s own pathological and paranoid monstrosity. The scope of this study is so vast and yet so thorough in its attention to specifics and detail that it invites the reader to digest with gusto the parallels between the decentered cityscapes that have been shaped by experiences of empire, colonialism, periphery, immigration, class, and race. The internal registers of these experiences are deftly treated in a lucid and eloquent language of literary scholarship that is of extremely high caliber in its comprehensive critical research and trenchant comparative interpretations.

While the author’s encompassing scholarship draws upon the significant critical works of each artistic work and its author, she has composed an original comparative study that may in part be compared to the work of Fitz and Payne in their study of gender treatment in a comparative Latin American context. However, Allen’s work surpasses that study in its inclusion of two major fields that in turn also interweave other authors and works related to the principal narratives in the respective fields and, moreover, she does so with confident mastery and incisive readings. For example, when speaking of the Russian works, Allen treats other Eastern European texts that dialogue with Dostoevsky and Gogol while for the Brazilian focus, other Latin American and Continental Portuguese authors such as Pessoa are brought into the analytical framework. Besides affording fresh readings of Dostoevsky and Gogol and Brazil’s Machado de Assis within the conceptual zone of eccentric aesthetics, Allen elevates both of these literatures, especially Brazilian, to new levels of insight on the visible plane of world literature. For the Luso-Brazilian field, this comparative selection constitutes a unique opportunity to introduce authors who have been relegated to the literary margins. In other words, Allen’s work not only illustrates the expanse of her own expertise, but in so doing expands the reader’s literary consciousness and interpretive range by bringing together what appear to be disparate worlds but ones which contain insidious parallels even within their major differences.

Albeit an extremely ambitious work of literary study, “EccentriCities” succeeds in great part due to its strategic developmental structure which begins from the stance of the modernist “concentric” novel within the context of urban literature and then proceeds to define its “eccentric” texts, dissident and de-familiarizing in their form and content toward the self-conscious evocations of the two featured major cities—St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro. This structure then evolves into new perspectives on the use of metaphors of madness, death and underground that discuss Gogol’s distinctiveness in terms of the dialogic and then followed by the focus upon the “underground” in Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis. This structure concludes with the invocation of the eccentric’s “hallucinated” characteristics and their role in showing how even concentric cities have an eccentric component.

This study also addresses significant issues emerging in the innovative field of literature and infrastructure. As Allen points out, St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro demand special kinds of infrastructure which frequently led to schizophrenic designs that coincide with the construction of the multi-faceted, open-ended and elusive narratives that nonetheless produce, despite their “insecure” and vulnerable socio-political and historical backdrops, new trans-cultural modes of thought. These perspectives are seen via inter-textual parody, Menippean satire, ambivalent and purposeful mistreatment and carnivalized embodiments, thereby defying literary conventions but, above all, providing dissembling and playful forms that demand reader participation. What is so remarkable about this literature rests with its two- century existence that has been interpreted under different labels and categories. This work brings to light a new and

provocative way of understanding narrative voices that have experienced constant displacement and irrationality in narratives that evoke perpetual identity crises commensurate with the modern and post-modern sensibility of inter- cultural relations.

I highly recommend publication because I believe this study will satisfy a number of diverse audiences interested in Latin American, Slavic, Comparative, and Urban literatures as well as those students and scholars working on narratology and the development of the novel beyond the scope of European letters. This work will be especially useful for professors and advanced graduate students working across cultural borders because the focus of this study points to the porous nature and anxiety of influence that emerge in the narratives under study.

Sincerely,

Nelson H. Vieira

University Professor and Professor of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies, and Judaic Studies Department of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies Brown University