Semiotic theory during the 1980s and early 1990s in the former Soviet Union departs significantly from earlier, structuralist models. Central to this new declination is Yury Lotman's theory of the semiosphere, a metaphor that, in its spatialization of meaning, draws on Vernadsky's concept of the biosphere and Bakhtin's idea of the logosphere. This article evaluates the semiosphere from historical, comparative, and feminist critical perspectives. The historical perspective situates Lotman's theory within the Russian organicist philosophical tradition (including Vernadsky and Bakhtin), and the comparative considers Russian theory as a counterpart to Western models of signification. The feminist critique is motivated by the fact that, in relying on metaphors borrowed from reproductive biology, organicist theory participates in a theoretical discourse that has perpetuated stereotyped categories based on gender differences. (AM)

Dickens's A Christmas Carol exemplifies the literary and cinematic use of visual representation to reinforce ideological values in Western culture. The story positions Scrooge and its readers as spectators of a series of culturally valorized scenes; access to the spectator's idealized self depends on the ability to perceive and desire (to identify and identify with) the values embedded in those scenes. Scrooge saves his life by recovering what the story posits as his natural ability to identify with representations, an ability that characterizes both his ideal, sympathetic self and the ideal subject of commodity culture.

In approaching the enigmatic representation of Germann's fantastic visions and experiences in “The Queen of Spades,” Dostoevsky argues that the perfection of the story lies in Pushkin's ability to make mutually exclusive ideas equally convincing. However, Germann's madness, one of the story's central events, has been treated almost uniformly as a sort of punishment visited on the hero by the author. To be sure, Pushkin often resorts to parody to bring out the reductive and vulgar aspects of his hero's imagination and madness—a literary practice of the times. Nevertheless, Pushkin also subtly provides evidence for an antithetical but equally valid romantic interpretation of Germann's madness and life. When Germann chooses the queen at the end, he takes the right card: for the first time in his life, he chooses to risk, to gamble—that is, to live. Germann's choice—and the madness that leads to and results from it—echoes in Russian literature from Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov to Nabokov's own Hermann/GepMaH, in Despair.

In classical rhetoric, irony is included in allegory (“other speaking”) as one of its species: contradiction, or antiphrasis. Because contradiction is incompatible with the classical definition of allegory as “continued metaphor” and with the synecdochal and associative mode of thinking (polysemy) typical of complex allegorical works, irony was excluded from allegory in postclassical literary theory. Nevertheless, the conditions for allegorical expression are grounded in the systematic confrontation of antiphrasis and polysemy, as in a grid. For allegory to emerge from this scene of confrontation, polysemy must predominate, transforming the grid into a perspectival regress to an origin that remains out of sight. This transformation is accomplished by means of interpretation, to which irony, being confined to the realm of the subject, is inimical. Antiphrasis remains present throughout. But it is interpreted as the resonance of the origin that remains out of sight. (GT)

In The Life of the Poet, Lawrence Lipking speaks of the mature poet's effort to shape a summation in verse that will give meaning and wholeness to the poet's lifework. Osip Mandelstam refused to create such a summation, unlike many of his modernist contemporaries. He developed instead a complex, playful, defiantly open-ended poetics that resists all attempts to shape a definitive, fitting conclusion to his life-in-art. Seeking an appropriate poetic ending to the life of the poet-martyr—Mandelstam died en route to the gulag at the height of Stalin's terror—many critics chose to overlook the provocatively playful lyrics that accompany his more somber late verses. Through analysis of two poems on Charlie Chaplin written near the end of Mandelstam's life, this essay aims both to reopen the question of the poet's ending and to complicate the reader's portrait of the artist's final days.

A textual edition can be read as a cultural performance if one considers its interlaced linguistic and bibliographical codes as monumentalizing rhetoric, opening the textual space of the edition into the social space of its production, distribution, and reception. Mary Shelley's 1824 edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Posthumous Poems and the pirated volume published by the radical William Benbow in 1826 each produce what might be called a “rhetoric of Shelley,” a product of—and participant in — a larger set of social discourses and mechanisms of cultural reproduction. Whereas Mary Shelley's edition was successful, however, Benbow's “illegitimate” edition was not. Derwent Coleridge's discussion of Benbow's piracy reveals how the failure to appropriate Shelley for radical discourse could be claimed not merely as a justification of the “purity” of Shelley's poetry but also as what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “sociodicy,” the justification of an entire social hierarchy. (NF)

In the summer of 1961, three brilliant young scholars at the Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow set out by train to see Bakhtin for the first time, in the far-off provincial town of Saransk, where he taught Russian and foreign literatures at the University of Mordovia (until declining health forced him to retire in August 1961). The three devoted admirers were Sergey Georgyevich Bocharov (the author of the following article), Georgy Dmitryevich Gachev, and Vadim Valeryanovich Kozhinov (the enterprising and resourceful leader of the group).

The emerging science of anthropology created myths of the primitive that became important to literary modernism's mythic interpretation of contemporary history. T. S. Eliot and James Joyce in particular were attracted to the work of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, whose theory of the mentalité primitive appeared to offer alternatives to prevailing modes of Western logic. Eliot took this myth of anthropology and other ones at face value insofar as they contributed to his theories of poetic origins and to his attacks on modern civilization. He opposed a primitivist ideal of tradition to the notion of a corrupt civilization embodied in the figure of the Jew. In contrast, Joyce treated anthropology ironically as a discursive construct rooted in colonizing enterprises of European institutions and thought. He satirized anthropology's pretensions while exploiting its material for his artistic ends.

By renouncing poetry in 1942, Laura (Riding) Jackson won a kind of authority over her critics and interpreters. Though silence as a poet was a high price to pay, (Riding) Jackson managed to insulate her poetry from critical representation by denying her assent to every interpreter's necessary assumption that her poems succeed at meaning something. Her renunciation mirrors the motion toward silence that animates a number of her poems, notably “Memories of Mortalities” and “Lucrece and Nara.” These poems, like (Riding) Jackson herself, use a final state of silence to insist on the authority of a woman's speaking voice, despite the critical appetites of others.

In Our Nig (1859), Harriet E. Wilson offered the story of her life for sale to save her son's life. In her appeal for patronage, however, Wilson looked not for charity but rather for an economic exchange by which the cultural value of her critique of the mid-nineteenth-century northern states could be acknowledged. The narrative defines this exchange as an entrance into a moral economy — a new system of social relations based not on an ideal of cooperation but on the recognition that conflict and distrust among and within culturally defined social groups are inevitable. In this way, Our Nig responds to proslavery forces that found ready arguments in the injustices of capitalism and calls attention to the ethical motivations behind economic relations. (JE)

Fukazawa Shichirō's 1960 short story “Furyū mutan” (“The Story of a Dream of Courtly Elegance”) humorously postulates an anarchic popular uprising that culminates in the execution of the Japanese imperial family. A right-wing terrorist attack on the story's publisher not only prompted an end to the depiction of the emperor in fiction but also may have caused the informal ban—still in force—against any overtly critical public discussion of the emperor system (tennō-sei). What distinguished “Furyū mutan” from earlier literary treatments of the emperor is its unique parody of his postwar, postdivine status as emblem of a democratic citizenry and, at the same time, of his cultural duties as principal poet of the nation. Fukazawa's carnivalesque mockery of imperial verse challenges the rhetoric of the emperor's ambiguous role as Japan's foremost symbol and reigning symbolist. The apparent price, however, has been the freedom of Japanese writers to raise such issues ever again.