LIT 230E Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Theory

Twentieth-century Russian literary theory from Formalism and Marxism to Bakhtin and contemporary Soviet semiotics. Seminal theoretical and literary texts are discussed in the context of Soviet literary culture and politics: literary polemics of the twenties, subsequent consolidation of Communist Party control and the monopoly of Socialist Realism, post-Stalinist thaw, and the development of the Moscow and Tartu schools of semiotics.