Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia: Joseph Brodsky and Travel Writing

Joseph Brodsky, one of the most influential Russian intellectuals of the late Soviet period, was born in Leningrad in 1940, emigrated to the United States in 1972, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, and died in New York City in 1996. Brodsky was one of the leading public figures of Soviet emigration in the Cold War period, and his role as a model for the constructing of Russian cultural identities in the last years of the Soviet Union was, and still is, extremely important. One of Joseph Brodsky’s great contributions to Russian culture of the latter half of the twentieth century is the wide geographical scope of his poetic and prose works. Brodsky was not a travel writer, but he was a traveling writer who wrote a considerable number of poems and essays which relate to his trips and travels in the Soviet empire and outside it. Travel writing offered for Brodsky a discursive space for negotiating his own transculturation, while it also offered him a discursive space for making powerful statements about displacement, culture, history and geography, time and space—all major themes of his poetry. In this study of Joseph Brodsky’s travel writing I focus on his travel texts in poetry and prose, which relate to his post-1972 trips to Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, and Venice. Questions of empire, tourism, and nostalgia are foregrounded in one way or another in Brodsky’s travel writing performed in emigration. I explore these concepts through the study of tropes, strategies of identity construction, and the politics of representation. The theoretical premises of my work draw on the literary and cultural criticism which has evolved around the study of travel and travel writing in recent years. These approaches have gained much from the scholarly experience provided by postcolonial critique. Shifting the focus away from the concept of exile, the traditional framework for scholarly discussions of Brodsky’s works, I propose to review Brodsky’s travel poetry and prose as a response not only to his exilic condition but to the postmodern and postcolonial landscape, which initially shaped the writing of these texts. Discussing Brodsky’s travel writing in this context offers previously unexplored perspectives for analyzing the geopolitical, philosophical, and linguistic premises of his poetic imagination. By situating Brodsky’s travel writing in the geopolitical landscape of postcolonial postmodernity, I attempt to show how Brodsky’s engagement with his contemporary cultural practices in the West was incorporated into his Russian-language travel poetry and prose and how this engagement thus contributed to these texts’ status as exceptional and unique literary events within late Soviet Russian cultural practices.

Rhetoric and Representation : Exploring the Cultural Meaning of the Natural Sciences in Contemporary Popular Science Writing and Literature

Kirjallisuuden- ja kulttuurintutkimus on viimeisten kolmen vuosikymmenen aikana tullut yhä enenevässä määrin tietoiseksi tieteen ja taiteen suhteen monimutkaisesta luonteesta. Nykyään näiden kahden kulttuurin tutkimus muodostaa oman kenttänsä, jolla niiden suhdetta tarkastellaan ennen kaikkea dynaamisena vuorovaikutuksena, joka heijastaa kulttuurimme kieltä, arvoja ja ideologisia sisältöjä. Toisin kuin aiemmat näkemykset, jotka pitävät tiedettä ja taidetta toisilleen enemmän tai vähemmän vastakkaisina pyrkimyksinä, nykytutkimus lähtee oletuksesta, jonka mukaan ne ovat kulttuurillisesti rakentuneita diskursseja, jotka kohtaavat usein samankaltaisia todellisuuden mallintamiseen liittyviä ongelmia, vaikka niiden käyttämät metodit eroavatkin toisistaan. Väitöskirjani keskittyy yllä mainitun suhteen osa-alueista popularisoidun tietokirjallisuuden (muun muassa Paul Davies, James Gleick ja Richard Dawkins) käyttämän kielen ja luonnontieteistä ideoita ammentavan kaunokirjallisuuden (muun muassa Jeanette Winterson, Tom Stoppard ja Richard Powers) hyödyntämien keinojen tarkasteluun nojautuen yli 30 teoksen kattavaa aineistoa koskevaan tyylin ja teemojen tekstianalyysiin. Populaarin tietokirjallisuuden osalta tarkoituksenani on osoittaa, että sen käyttämä kieli rakentuu huomattavassa määrin sellaisille rakenteille, jotka tarjoavat mahdollisuuden esittää todellisuutta koskevia argumentteja mahdollisimman vakuuttavalla tavalla. Tässä tehtävässä monilla klassisen retoriikan määrittelemillä kuvioilla on tärkeä rooli, koska ne auttavat liittämään sanotun sisällön ja muodon tiukasti toisiinsa: retoristen kuvioiden käyttö ei näin ollen edusta pelkkää tyylikeinoa, vaan se myös usein kiteyttää argumenttien taustalla olevat tieteenfilosofiset olettamukset ja auttaa vakiinnuttamaan argumentoinnin logiikan. Koska monet aikaisemmin ilmestyneistä tutkimuksista ovat keskittyneet pelkästään metaforan rooliin tieteellisissä argumenteissa, tämä väitöskirja pyrkii laajentamaan tutkimuskenttää analysoimalla myös toisenlaisten kuvioiden käyttöä. Osoitan myös, että retoristen kuvioiden käyttö muodostaa yhtymäkohdan tieteellisiä ideoita hyödyntävään kaunokirjallisuuteen. Siinä missä popularisoitu tiede käyttää retoriikkaa vahvistaakseen sekä argumentatiivisia että kaunokirjallisia ominaisuuksiaan, kuvaa tällainen sanataide tiedettä tavoilla, jotka usein heijastelevat tietokirjallisuuden kielellisiä rakenteita. Toisaalta on myös mahdollista nähdä, miten kaunokirjallisuuden keinot heijastuvat popularisoidun tieteen kerrontatapoihin ja kieleen todistaen kahden kulttuurin dynaamisesta vuorovaikutuksesta. Nykyaikaisen populaaritieteen retoristen elementtien ja kaunokirjallisuuden keinojen vertailu näyttää lisäksi, kuinka tiede ja taide osallistuvat keskusteluun kulttuurimme tiettyjen peruskäsitteiden kuten identiteetin, tiedon ja ajan merkityksestä. Tällä tavoin on mahdollista nähdä, että molemmat ovat perustavanlaatuisia osia merkityksenantoprosessissa, jonka kautta niin tieteelliset ideat kuin ihmiselämän suuret kysymyksetkin saavat kulttuurillisesti rakentuneen merkityksensä.

"Four Ways of Writing the City" : St. Petersburg-Leningrad as a Metaphor in the Poetry of Joseph Brodsky

The present study discusses the theme of St. Petersburg-Leningrad in Joseph Brodsky's verse works. The chosen approach to the evolving im-age of the city in Brodsky's poetry is through four metaphors: St. Petersburg as "the common place" of the Petersburg Text, St. Petersburg as "Paradise and/or Hell", St. Petersburg as "a Utopian City" and St. Petersburg as "a Void". This examination of the city-image focusses on the aspects of space and time as basic categories underlying the poet's poetic world view. The method used is close reading, with an emphasis on semantical interpretation. The material consists of eighteen poems dating from 1958 to 1994. Apart from investigating the spatio-temporal features, the study focusses on exposing and analysing the allusions in the scrutinised works to other texts from Russian and Western belles lettres. Terminology (introduced by Bakhtin and Yury Lotman, among others) concerning the poetics of space in literature is employed in the present study. Conceptions originating from the paradigm of possible worlds are also used in elucidating the position of fictional and actual chronotopes and heroes in Brodsky's poetry. Brodsky's image of his native city is imbued with intertextual linkings. Through reminiscences of the "Divine Comedy" and Russian modernists, the city is paralleled with Dante's "lost and accursed" Florence, as well as with the lost St. Petersburg of Mandel'shtam and Akhmatova. His city-image is related to the Petersburg myth in Russian literature through their common themes of death and separation as well as through the merging of actual realia with the fictional worlds of the Petersburg Text. In his later poems, when his view of the city is that of an exiled poet, the city begins to lose its actual world referents, turning into a mental realm which is no longer connected to any particular geographical location or historical time. It is placed outside time. The native city as the homeland in its entirety is replaced by another existence created in language.

Adolescent writing development: Improving succinctness using the extended noun phrase

This study examined an aspect of adolescent writing development, specifically whether teaching secondary school students to use strategies to enhance succinctness in their essays changed the grammatical sophistication of their sentences. A quasi-experimental intervention was used to compare changes in syntactic complexity and lexical density between one-draft and polished essays. No link was demonstrated between the intervention and the changes. A thematic analysis of teacher interviews explored links between changes to student texts and teaching approaches. The study has implications for making syntactic complexity an explicit goal of student drafting.

Writing Otherwise than Seeing : Writing and Exteriority in Maurice Blanchot

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), the French writer and novelist, is one of the most important figures in post-war French literature and philosophy. The main intention of this study is to figure out his position and originality in the field of phenomenology. Since this thesis concentrates on the notion of vision in Blanchot s work, its primary context is the post-war discussion of the relation between seeing and thinking in France, and particularly the discussion of the conditions of non-violent vision and language. The focus will be on the philosophical conversation between Blanchot and his contemporary philosophers. The central premise is the following: Blanchot relates the criticism of vision to the criticism of the representative model of language. In this thesis, Blanchot s definition of literary language as the refusal to reveal anything is read as a reference pointing in two directions. First, to Hegel s idea of naming as negativity which reveals Being incrementally to man, and second, to Heidegger s idea of poetry as the simultaneity of revealing and withdrawal; the aim is to prove that eventually Blanchot opposes both Hegel s idea of naming as a gradual revelation of the totality of being and Heidegger s conception of poetry as a way of revealing the truth of Being. My other central hypothesis is that for Blanchot, the criticism of the privilege of vision is always related to the problematic of the exteriority. The principal intention is to trace how Blanchot s idea of language as infinity and exteriority challenges both the Hegelian idea of naming as conceptualizing things and Heidegger s concept of language as a way to truth (as aletheia). The intention is to show how Blanchot, with his concepts of fascination, resemblance and image, both affirms and challenges the central points of Heidegger s thinking on language. Blanchot s originality in, and contribution to, the discussion about the violence of vision and language is found in his answer to the question of how to approach the other by avoiding the worst violence . I claim that by criticizing the idea of language as naming both in Hegel and Heidegger, Blanchot generates an account of language which, since it neither negates nor creates Being, is beyond the metaphysical opposition between Being and non-Being.

Vilijonkka ikkunassa - Tove Janssonin muumiteosten kuva, sana ja liike

Tove Jansson (1914--2001) was a Finnish illustrator, author, artist, caricaturist and comic artist. She is best known for her Moomin Books, written in Swedish, which she illustrated herself, and published between 1945 and 1977. My study focuses on the interweaving of images and words in Jansson s picturebooks, novels and short stories situated in the fantasy world of Moomin Valley. In particular, it concentrates on Jansson s development of a special kind of aesthetics of movement and stasis, based upon both illustration and text. The conventions of picturebook art and illustration are significant to both Jansson s visual art and her writing, and she was acutely conscious of them. My analysis of Jansson s work begins by discussing her first published picturebooks and less familiar illustrations (before she began her Moomin books) and I then proceed to discuss her three Moomin picturebooks, The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My; Who Will Comfort Toffle?, and The Dangerous Journey. The discussion moves from images to words and from words to images: Barthes s (1982) concept of anchoring and, in particular, what he calls relaying , form a point of reading and viewing Moomin texts and illustrations in a complementary relation, in which the message s unity occurs on a higher level: that of the story, the anecdote, the diegesis . The eight illustrated Moomin novels and one collection of short stories are analysed in a similar manner, taking into account the academic discourse about picturebooks which was developed in the last decade of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century by, among others, scholars such as Nodelman, Rhedin, Doonan, Thiele, Stephens, Lewis, Nikolajeva and Scott. In her Moomin books, Jansson uses a wide variety of narrative and illustrative styles which are complementary to each other. Each book is different and unique in its own way, but a certain development or progression of mood and representation can be seen when assessing the series as a whole. Jansson s early stories are happy and adventurous but her later Moomin novels, beginning from Moominland Midwinter, focus more on the interiority of the characters, placing them in difficult situations which approximate social reality. This orientation is also reflected in the representation of movement and space. The books which were published first include more obviously descriptive passages, exemplifying the tradition of literary pictorialism. Whereas in Jansson s later work, the space develops into something that is alive which can have an enduring effect on the characters personalities and behaviour. This study shows how the idea of an image a dynamic image -- forms a holistic foundation for Jansson s imagination and work. The idea of central perspective, or frame, for instance, provided inspiration for whole stories or in the way that she developed her characters, as in the case of the Fillyjonk, who is a complex female figure, simultaneously frantic and prim. The idea of movement is central to the narrative art of picturebooks and illustrated texts, particularly in relation to the way that action is depicted. Jansson, however, also develops a specific choreography of characters in which poses and postures signify action, feelings and relationships. Here, I use two ideas from modern dance, contraction and release (Graham), to characterise the language of movement which is evident in Jansson s words and images. In Jansson s final Moomin novels and short stories, the idea of space becomes more and more dynamic and closely linked with characterisation. My study also examines a number of Jansson s early sketches for her Moomin novels, in which movement is performed much more dramatically than in those illustrations which appeared in the last novels to be published.

Writing the Digital Futures Report 2014-2105 Arts Queensland

The Writing the Digital Futures project brings together international knowledge and expertise in digital writing to cement Queensland as a centre of innovation in writing and publishing within Australia. The purpose of the digital futures project is to change community and professional perceptions of storytelling and publishing in a digital age, with particular emphasis on transmedia/multi-platform storytelling.

Collaborative writing to enhance cross-cultural understanding within the academy

This paper describes the design and implementation of a research writing workshop for postgraduate students. The workshop was developed to respond to two key issues currently on the agenda in Australia’s universities: a push to embed Indigenous perspectives into the curriculum, and a desire to develop creative works as quality research outputs. The workshop was carefully designed to provide opportunities for participants to practise and improve their writing; develop transferable writing skills; develop a culturally safe environment where Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians could work together; provide a place to practise collaborative writing and collaborative facilitating; and provide an opportunity to develop a publication-ready, creative writing piece that was co-developed by participants. In this paper, the authors provide an overview of the literature relevant to Indigenizing a workshop curriculum and reflect on the genre of Indigenous writing in Australia. They also discuss the literature relevant to their collaboration as both writers and facilitators. They conclude that the workshop processes contributed to building a relationship of collaboration and trust between the facilitators and participants, and that these processes directly contributed to the successful workshop outcomes.

Albert Einstein writing; California Portraits; Men

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Albert Einstein writing at desk Portraits; Men

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Elisabet Eliasberg writing in her first American home after fleeing Hitler's Austria; 73 Payson Avenue, New York City Portraits Women

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Writing fashion’s future: the gods and monsters of the Anthropocene

This paper identifies two narratives of the Anthropocene and explores how they play out in the realm of future-looking fashion production. Each narrative draws on mythic comparisons to gods and monsters to express humanity’s dilemmas, albeit from different perspectives. The first is a Malthusian narrative of collapse and scarcity, brought about by the monstrous, unstoppable nature of human technology set loose on the natural world. In this vein, philosopher Slavoj Zizek (2010) draws on Biblical analogies, likening ecological crisis to one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. To find a myth to suit the present times, novelist A.S Byatt (2011) proposes Ragnarök, a Norse myth in which the gods destroy themselves. In contrast, the second narrative is one of technological cornucopia. Stewart Brand (2009, 27), self-described ‘eco-pragmatist’ writes, ‘we are as gods and we have to get good at it’. In his view, human technologies offer the only hope to mitigating the problems caused by human technology – Brand suggests harnessing nuclear power, bioengineering of crops and the geoengineering of the planet as the way forward. Similarly, the French philosopher Bruno Latour (2012, 274), exhorts us to “love our monsters”, likening our technologies to Doctor Frankenstein’s monster – set loose upon the world, and then reviled by his creator. For both Brand and Latour, human technology may be monstrous, but it must also be turned toward solutions. Within this schema, hopeful visions of the future of fashion are similarly divided. In the techno-enabled cornucopian future, the fashion industry embraces wearable technology, speed and efficiency. Technologies such as waterless dyeing, 3D printing and self-cleaning garments shift fashion into a new era of cleaner production. Meanwhile, in the narrative of scarcity, a more cautious approach sees fashion return to a new localism and valuing of the hand-made in a time of shrinking resources. Through discussion of future-looking fashion designers, brands, and activists, this paper explores how they may align along a spectrum to one of these two grand narratives of the future. The paper will discuss how these narratives may unconsciously shape the perspective of both producers and users around the fashion of today and the fashion of tomorrow. This paper poses the question: what stories can be written for fashion’s future in the Anthropocene, and are they fated, or can they be re-written?

Albert Einstein writing; California Portraits; Men

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Albert Einstein writing at desk Portraits; Men

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Artist Rafaello Busoni seated and writing at a desk; Berlin.

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