Charles Emerson
Biographic Data
| ID | 194303 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charles Emerson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charles |
| FAMILY NAME | Emerson |
| SIGNATURE | EMERSON C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0009-0005-2182-2323 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 111 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 147 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 111 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Becoming Dostoevsky (how Rowan Williams opens up Bakhtin)
With the end of Communism in Russia, non‐materialist contexts were enthusiastically restored to Mikhail Bakhtin's globally famous ideas of carnival, dialogism, and polyphony. This essay surveys Rowan Williams's 2008 study Dostoevsky: Language, Faith + Fiction as a major contribution to this effort, concentrating on those general philosophical principles that Williams and Bakhtin share: the Trinitarian nature of interpersonal relation, our need fo…
Recurrent Events
From the perspective of the West, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 reopened the Cold War. For Russian émigrés and exiles, the history and philosophy behind the present war goes back much further. In Marina Bykova's edition of essays At the Vanishing Point of History (2025), fifteen anguished, eminent expatriates, most of them historians and philosophers, provide political, geographical, psychological, and literary backstories to the disaster—…
Caryl Emerson responds
The Russian Review
The Peril of Thinking for Others
Sibelan Forrester and Olga Partan, eds. The Russian Intelligentsia. Myth, Mission, and Metamorphosis. Myths and Taboos in Slavic Cultures. Boston: Academic Studies Press. 2025. 398 pp. $129.00. The Russian intelligentsia, it turns out, resembles Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the novel. A protean and self-reflecting category, it can swallow its own parodies without ceasing to be itself, and it includes (as Svetlana Evdokimova observes of Anton Chekh…
Philosophy as novelistic fiction in the work of two old friends
Bakhtin + x, through a Modernist Mask
Birgy, Philippe, ed. Understanding Bakhtin, Understanding Modernism. Bloomsbury Series on Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. 291 pp. $117.00. ISBN 978-1-5013-8164-5. Why still Bakhtin? The short answer is that once a thinker booms and becomes an adjective, dying out is hard. Too many people have invited his live presence into their own work. Make use of an idea, however, and it will mutate—ofte…
Playing with Fire
Maria Yudina (1899–1970) is the stuff of legend. A piano prodigy from the western reaches of the Russian Empire, appointed full professor at Petrograd Conservatoire in 1923 (two years after graduating), she rose to the top in a career dotted with scandal, poverty, daring repertoire, and reckless acts of compassion. According to Mikhail Bakhtin—her intimate friend for over half a century, who threads his own stressed way through Wilson's story—Yud…
Chronotopic thresholds
Notes1 "Bobok" first appeared in February 1873, in Dostoevsky's own newspaper column Diary of a Writer. The class used the translation by Constance Garnett in The Short Stories of Dostoevsky, edited by William Phillips (The Dial Press, New York, 1946): pp. 505–25.2 ". . . we can say outright that the menippea essentially sets the tone for Dostoevsky's entire creative output. We would hardly be mistaken in saying that 'Bobok,' in all its depth and…
Intellectual Life and Literature at Solovki, 1923-1930
Russia is again becoming dark. In a double-edged move for imprisonment studies, Gullotta has turned a patient scholarly eye on one pocket of the gulag that briefly experienced more light than most. Geographically his focus is tiny, but its history stretches over half a millennium. In 1429, three monks founded a retreat on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, the Russian Far North. Consecrated as a frontier monastery/fortress in the sixteenth …
The Origins of Russian Literary Theory
Kolyma Stories
Varlam Shalamov completed six cycles of stories, well over a thousand pages, inspired by his eighteen years as a slave in the Gulag's farthest northern camps. The tales are graphic, brutal, abrupt—intended, in his words, as “slaps in the face of Stalinism.” In the volume under review, Donald Rayfield has translated the first three cycles; cycles 4 through 6 followed in 2020. Although fame came late to Shalamov (1907–82), his intimate circle was o…
Between Two Millstones, Book 1
It is a heady experience to reread Solzhenitsyn in the aftermath of Alexei Navalny's heroic repatriation to Russia. Chemically poisoned in Tomsk, healed in a Berlin hospital, Navalny was promptly incarcerated once he returned home. “The very best thing in Russia now,” he told the Moscow court that sentenced him to prison early in February 2021, “are the people who aren't afraid.” In his fearlessness and high-profile disgust, Navalny has a predece…
The Russian Revolution as fantastic synaesthetic event (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii and Vladimir Sharov)
This essay introduces two experimental Russian writers, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii (1887–1950) from the Soviet era and Vladimir Sharov (1952–2018) from the post-Soviet period, through their depictions of the Revolution and Civil War. Both attempt to ‘estrange’ this horrific period by drawing on unusual sensory input – smells, for example, or textures and densities – thus allowing the reader to bypass the brute political event in favour of its ‘fee…
Agricultural permanence in large Asian cities
Nanjing, the capital of China's Jiangsu Province, has grown rapidly during the post-reform era and the pace of change placed tremendous pressure on the city's arable land resources. This case study of land use/land cover change (LU/LC) in Nanjing's Jiangning district assesses changes in agricultural land, production, and labor within the ten 2016-era jiedao (sub-district political units) of Jiangning from 2000 to 2015. This case study provides an…
Tolstoevsky
The Girl from the Metropol Hotel
Book Review| April 01 2020 The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing up in Communist Russia by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya Petrushevskaya, Ludmilla, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing up in Communist Russia, trans. Summers, Anna (New York: Penguin, 2017), 176 pp. Caryl Emerson Caryl Emerson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2020) 26 (2): 353. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-8192762 Cite Icon Cite Sha…
Utopias of One by Joshua Kotin
Review Article| January 01 2020 Utopias of One by Joshua Kotin Kotin, Joshua, Utopias of One (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 205 pp. Caryl Emerson Caryl Emerson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2020) 26 (1): 151–152. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-7899635 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Caryl Emerson; Utopias of One by Joshua Kotin. Common Kn…
Shklovsky
Research Article| April 01 2019 Shklovsky: Witness to an Era, trans. Jamie Richards by Serena Vitale Vitale, Serena, Shklovsky: Witness to an Era, trans. Richards, Jamie (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2012), 120 pp. Caryl Emerson Caryl Emerson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2019) 25 (1-3): 433–434. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-7312405 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Mail…
The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin
The Discovery of Chance
Book Review| January 01 2018 The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen by Aileen M. Kelly Kelly, Aileen M., The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 582 pp. Caryl Emerson Caryl Emerson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2018) 24 (1): 173–174. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-4254180 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon …
Mixail Baxtin redécouvre les formalistes au sortir de la nuit stalinienne
L'article examine la relation entre deux visions opposées des études littéraires : l'une, intuitive, philosophique, synthétique et personnelle (Mixail Baxtin) ; l'autre, scientifique, quantitative, analytique et impersonnelle (les formalistes russes). Notre approche s'inspire d'un bref essai rédigé par Baxtin dans ses carnets de travail à la fin des années 1960 : « Mon attitude à l'égard du formalisme ? » et « Mon attitude à l'égard du structural…
On Mikhail Bakhtin and human studies (with continual reference to Moscow and Sheffield)
This essay was reconstructed and upgraded from lecture notes for a keynote address delivered, with modest visuals, on 28 October 2016 at the University of Sheffield, U.K. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of its program in Russian and Slavonic Studies. Academic home to both the Bakhtin Centre (founded in 1994) and the Prokhorov Centre (founded 2014), Sheffield includes among its past and present faculty several prominent scholars who have wor…
For Sergei Georgievich Bocharov (10 May 1929–6 March 2017) / Светлой памяти Сергея Георгиевича Бочарова
Remarkable Tolstoy, From the Age of Empire to the Putin Era (1894–2006)
С 1894 по 2006 гг. в биографической серии «Жизнь замечательных людей» вышли четыре биографии Л.Н. Толстого. Данный доклад посвящен двум из них: первой, изданной еще в царскую эпоху, и последней, изданной уже в постсоветское время. Оба жизнеописания представляют собой дополнительный интерес и с точки зрения издательской практики, так как являются ярким воплощением принципов издания, заложенных его двумя влиятельными редакторами, Ф.Ф. Павленковым,.…
The Outer Word and Inner Speech
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
The Dialogic Imagination
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
Rethinking Bakhtin
The essays in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges extend Bakhtin's concepts in important new directions and challenge Bakhtin's own use of his most cherished ideas. Four sets of paired essays explore the theory of parody, the relation of de Man's poetics to Bakhtin's dialogics, Bakhtin's approach to Tolstoy and ideological literature generally, and the dangers of dialogue, not only in practice but also as an ideal
Keeping the Self Intact During the Culture Wars
Keeping the Self Intact During the Culture Wars: A Centennial Essay for Mikhail Bakhtin Caryl Emerson (bio) The more demarcation, the better, but benevolent demarcation. Without border disputes. Cooperation. Mikhail Bakhtin, "From Notes Made in 1970-71" In November 1995, Mikhail Bakhtin turned one hundred. His international fame, the overuse and dilution of his terms, the embarrassment we now feel upon hearing the words "dialogue" or "carnival" d…
Shklovsky'sostranenie, Bakhtin'svnenakhodimost'(How Distance Serves an Aesthetics of Arousal Differently from an Aesthetics Based on Pain)
As literary critics and language theorists, Viktor Shklovsky and Mikhail Bakhtin each utilize "aesthetic distance" in an unconventional way-unrelated, it would seem, to the usual aesthetic criteria of beauty, goodness, or truth. For the Formalist Shklovsky, the distancing or estrangement of an object sharpens our perception and stimulates our senses, thereby arousing us to artistic (as opposed to drably everyday) experience. For the dialogic Bakh…
The Dialogic Imagination
Problems with Baxtin's Poetics
Agricultural permanence in large Asian cities
Nanjing, the capital of China's Jiangsu Province, has grown rapidly during the post-reform era and the pace of change placed tremendous pressure on the city's arable land resources. This case study of land use/land cover change (LU/LC) in Nanjing's Jiangning district assesses changes in agricultural land, production, and labor within the ten 2016-era jiedao (sub-district political units) of Jiangning from 2000 to 2015. This case study provides an…
New Words, New Epochs, Old Thoughts
When studying it, linguistics must collide with poetics, with the presence of everyday speech genres. Only three genres-the official report [doklad], the feuilleton, and the song-were in de facto use among the people, supplementing one another and at times overlapping each other in a strange way; popular mass songs appeared that developed and often simply repeated some thesis from a routine doklad. . . . From the very first years of the Revolutio…
The Dialogic Imagination
Philosophy as novelistic fiction in the work of two old friends
Chronotopic thresholds
Notes1 "Bobok" first appeared in February 1873, in Dostoevsky's own newspaper column Diary of a Writer. The class used the translation by Constance Garnett in The Short Stories of Dostoevsky, edited by William Phillips (The Dial Press, New York, 1946): pp. 505–25.2 ". . . we can say outright that the menippea essentially sets the tone for Dostoevsky's entire creative output. We would hardly be mistaken in saying that 'Bobok,' in all its depth and…
Michael Holquist (1935-2016)
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Bakhtin and the actor (with constant reference to Shakespeare)
On the Generation that Squandered its Philosophers (Losev, Bakhtin, and Classical Thought as Equipment for Living)
Pushkin, Literary Criticism, and Creativity in Closed Places
New Literary History - Volume 29, Number 4, Autumn 1998
Prosaics and the Problem of Form
Mikhail Bakhtin
The Shape of Russian Cultural Criticism in the Postcommunist Period
(1992). The Shape of Russian Cultural Criticism in the Postcommunist Period. Canadian Slavonic Papers: Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 353-371
Alexander A. Potebnja's Psycholinguistic Theory of Literature
The work of Alexander A. Potebnja, a leading Ukrainian linguist of the nineteenth century, has significantly influenced modern literary criticism, particularly Russian formalism and structuralism. Potebnja's theory, known as potebnjanstvo (Potebnjanism), flourished in the Russian Empire and in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. It attracted scores of adherents and gave rise to an influential literary journal and a formal critical school at Kharki…
Boris Godunov
The tale of Boris Godunov - tsar, usurper, tsarecide - dating from the early seventeenth-century Time of Troubles, inspired three major nineteenth-century Russian cultural expressions: in history by Nikolai Karamzin, in drama by Alexander Pushkin, and in opera by Modest Musorgsky. Each of these famous creations was a vehicle for generic innovation, in which a specifically Russian concept of genre was asserted in opposition to the reigning Europea…
Boris Godunov
Rozanov and the End of Literature
Rilke, Russia and the Igor Tale
The Dialogic Imagination
Grinev's Dream
There can be no doubt that the connections between our typical dreams and fairy tales and the material of other kinds of creative writing are neither few nor accidental It sometimes happens that : the sharp eye of a creative writer has an analytic realization of the process of transformation of which he is habitually no more than a tool.Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
The Dialogic Imagination
The Alterity of Discourse
The Dialogic Imagination
The Outer Word and Inner Speech
The Dialogic Imagination
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
Pretenders to History
Among the problematic works of great writers, Pushkin's Boris Godunov occupies a special place. This strange hybrid of history, drama, narrative poetry, and prose Pushkin called a "romantic tragedy," and he considered it his masterpiece. Yet the play's publication in 1831 was met with surprise and dismay. By consensus of a baffled public, Boris Godunov was a failure-neither romantic, nor feasible on the tragic stage.Since that time, generations o…
The Social and the Subject in Bakhtin
Varieties of Poetic Utterance
By applying several aspects of Mikhail Bahktin's discourse-utterance theory, the author examines the use of quotation in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. All ideological pronouncements made by the heroes of the book are classified into two types of poetic utterance: authoritative and internally persuasive discourse
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
Problems with Baxtin's Poetics
Sergei Prokofiev
The prolific creator of such classic popular works as Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella and Peter and the Wolf, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was one of the most important composers of the 20th century. This biography offers a detailed portrait of a complex man whose character, and music, combined the traditional and contemporary. Drawing on access to previously unknown or unavailable Russian-language sources, including extensive archival material, Har…
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
Boris Godunov
Scriabin
Depicts the life of the Russian composer, Alexander Scriabin, and examines the influence of his mystical beliefs on his music
Boris Godunov
The tale of Boris Godunov - tsar, usurper, tsarecide - dating from the early seventeenth-century Time of Troubles, inspired three major nineteenth-century Russian cultural expressions: in history by Nikolai Karamzin, in drama by Alexander Pushkin, and in opera by Modest Musorgsky. Each of these famous creations was a vehicle for generic innovation, in which a specifically Russian concept of genre was asserted in opposition to the reigning Europea…
Mikhail Bakhtin
Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Indeed, in a career spanning some sixty years, he experienced both dramatic and gradual changes in his thinking, returned to abandoned i…
Rethinking Bakhtin
Discontinuous Discourses in Modern Russian Literature
Art (70 works) · History (47 works) · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies (44 works) · Philosophy (42 works) · Literature (40 works) · Computer Science (34 works) · Political science (25 works) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (21 works) · Art history (19 works) · Philosophy (19 works)