Sentimentalism Made Strange: Shklovsky, Karamzin, Rousseau Alison Beth Annunziata Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Alison Beth Annunziata All rights reserved ABSTRACT Sentimentalism Made Strange: Shklovsky, Karamzin, Rousseau Alison Beth Annunziata This dissertation investigates the use of sentimentalist tropes in the work of Viktor Shklovsky, Nikolai Karamzin, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in order to draw conclusions regarding the overlaps between eighteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic imperatives. Specifically, it looks at love’s literary forms—epistolary, triolet, conte—as models and spaces for autobiography, and compares love and self-expression as two literary phenomena that, for these three authors, demand the undoing of cultural mores as the means for their artistic portrayal. For the bulk of my analysis, I take the three authors’ “Julie” texts—Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Héloïse, Karamzin’s “Julia,” and Shklovsky’s Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, a Third Eloise—in which love and self- expression meet to enact what I call Sentimentalism made strange. Using estrangement (ostranenie), the literary device identified by Shklovsky, as an organizing principle, I investigate the cultural shift towards an underlying crude, elemental, and ultimately ‘savage’ aesthetic that is treated in the work of the three authors I examine, and which sanctions a shift towards de-acculturation, de-institutionalization, and disarticulation that is seen in both sentimental and formalist fiction and criticism. While Rousseau factors into my analysis as the model sentimentalist, as the basis for Karamzin’s and Shklovsky’s own forays into Sentimentalism, in his effort to capture an authentic literary self he also estranges Sentimentalism’s canonical forms, revealing, along with Karamzin, proto- formalist tendencies. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ______________________________________________________ii Note on Transliteration __________________________________________________iii Introduction Sentimentalism Made Strange: Shklovsky, Karamzin, Rousseau _____________1 Chapter One___________________________________________________________19 Love and the Literary System: The Autobiographical Attempts of Shklovsky and Rousseau Chapter Two___________________________________________________________66 Love and Negative Poetics: Karamzin’s Self-reading Chapter Three_________________________________________________________111 Love and the Devices of Primitivism: The Portrait of Autonomy Conclusion___________________________________________________________153 Bibliography__________________________________________________________159 i Acknowledgements It is quite rare that I have the opportunity to extend thanks in printed form to those who selflessly support my endeavors, no matter how far-reaching, unrealistic, and seemingly impossible they may be. I do not wish to squander this opportunity. I beg my reader’s patience as I acknowledge my family and friends, without whom I could not have completed this dissertation. Daily notes and words of encouragement, weekly food and coffee deliveries, thoughtful care packages, and friendly visits all helped me to see this project through to its end. These acts of kindness prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that it takes a village to write a dissertation. I also owe a great deal of gratitude to my advisor, Professor Irina Reyfman, for all of her help and guidance, as well as to my other professors and colleagues at Columbia University who provided the encouragement, freedom, and faith that I needed to take the intellectual leaps and bounds that have led to this dissertation and that will inspire my future work. Thank you for a wonderfully supportive and generous intellectual environment. ii Note on Transliteration I am using a dual system of transliteration, following the guidelines in J. Thomas Shaw’s Transliteration of Modern Russian for English-Language Publications: In the text and in all discursive parts of the endnotes, Shaw’s “System I” is used, which anglicizes Russian proper names: the “y”-ending is used instead of “ii”; “yu”/“ya” is used instead of “iu”/“ia”; Tynianov and OPOIAZ are two exceptions. When citing Russian sources in the bibliography and notes, I use the Library of Congress system without diacritics (Shaw’s “System II”). iii 1 Sentimentalism Made Strange: Shklovsky, Karamzin, Rousseau This dissertation traces the junctions and disjunctions between the fiction and criticism of Russian Formalism and the sentimental prose of Russia’s and France’s late eighteenth century through the work of twentieth-century Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, eighteenth-century Russian Sentimentalist Nikolai Karamzin, and eighteenth- century French Sentimentalist Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the hope of closing the gap between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and of uncovering the inherent similarities between two contrasting critical approaches to literature—Sentimentalism and Formalism—this dissertation looks at the phenomenon of love as an organizing principle that guides literary self-expression. The proliferation of scholarship (from 2001 onward) that reexamines the major tenets of Formalism within the disciplines of literature, architecture, art history, and political science, among others, suggests that this topic is immediately relevant.1 I hope that considering the eighteenth century—in terms of both the literature it produced and as a period that is re-imagined in the literature of later generations—as a productive lens through which to assess the development of Formalism will contribute to this academic trend. This investigation leads to conclusions not only regarding how the eighteenth century influenced the development of Formalism, but also, inversely, how Formalist strategies were already alive in the eighteenth century. The motivation for this project is above all to satisfy an intellectual curiosity regarding the fundamental links between Shklovsky, Karamzin, and Rousseau in their central conceits; most importantly, I examine love as a coping mechanism that sanctions 1 For example, W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Commitment to Form; or Still Crazy after All These Years,” PMLA 118, no. 2 (March 2003): 321–325; Alexei Bogdanov, “Ostranenie, Kenosis, and Dialogue: The Metaphysics of Formalism According to Shklovsky,” The Slavic and East European Journal 49, no. 1 (April 2005): 48–62; Cristina Vatulescu, “The Politics of Estrangement: Tracking Shklovsky's Device through Literary and Policing Practices,” Poetics Today 27, no. 1 (March 1, 2006): 35–66. 2 and initiates a rebellion from the (neoclassical) mandates confining literary expression. In so doing, I demonstrate how the Formalist Viktor Shklovsky drew upon the eighteenth century as a source of inspiration for drafting his literary science. I investigate why he consistently, if quietly, engages eighteenth-century sentimental tropes and techniques in his fictional pursuits, and whether this relationship between periods—that is, late eighteenth century and early twentieth century—can be understood as intentional or as the ‘accidental’ result of a matrix of events that coalesce in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. In taking a giant leap over the nineteenth century, I am methodologically inspired most by the thesis set forth in Jeffrey Perl’s critical work, The Tradition of Return, in which Perl uses The Odyssey to illustrate a trajectory that is characteristic of how history is often read and philosophized. This trajectory he reads as an A-B-A cyclical pattern, the logic of which proceeds as follows: Odysseus leaves home (Classical Antiquity [A]) in search of the ideal (Middle Ages [B]) only to return home to reinstate the status quo (Renaissance [A]). This orientation towards homecoming, or nostos, from the Homeric tradition, Perl defines as “a return to something old but also a new beginning: it is a meeting of oldest and newest, yet it is in addition the seemly conclusion of an unbroken continuum.” 2 As Perl argues, nostos does not presume a perfect return. As “something old” as well as “a new beginning,” the Renaissance (A-copy) recognizes itself as a “revival” and not a “replica” of Classical Antiquity (A-original). Thus, if history were poetry its rhyme sequence would scan as A-B-A, but the rhyme would be imperfect. My 2 Jeffrey M. Perl, The Tradition of Return: The Implicit History of Modern Literature. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 23. 3 dissertation is in a sense a recasting of Perl’s hermeneutic, with Russian Formalism as the imperfect return to the eighteenth century—its A made strange. By “making strange” I mean two different theories. On the one hand, as per Perl’s assessment and as regards Shklovsky’s position within Russia’s literary canon, I mean a return (however, imperfect) to an earlier cultural period. On the other hand, I refer explicitly to Shklovsky’s estrangement (ostranenie), an artistic strategy for de- historicizing and de-contextualizing the reader by engaging his senses and dispelling the automatized forms that congest his modern mind; this, I believe, is a possible method for ‘reviving,’ according to formalist standards, the tropes, devices, systems, and conceits of literary sentimentalism. With estrangement as a guiding principle, I read Karamzin’s and Shklovsky’s idiosyncratic sentimentalisms as attempts to estrange Rousseau’s, to engage Rousseau’s