The Author as Researcher
- This article proposes a new perspective on avant-garde travel writing through the lens of scientific field work, investigating these new writing techniques in Boris Pil’niak’s expedition prose. In the 1920s, the researching writer represents a hidden, but influential counterpart to the widely propagated figure of the working writer. While the author as producer combines word and deed in an operative act, the author as researcher investigates the production of knowledge. This entails revising the centrality of facts. Literature as artistic research subverts factography by going beyond the horizons of veristic data registration to include uncharted realms and vague possibilities. This exploration leads to specific genres: the author as researcher tries his hand at a kind of laboratory text, a prolific genre at the intersection of testing equipment, recording media, and hypothetical thought. Not confined to a sterile lab, avant-garde writer-researchers, as members of research expeditions, oscillate between their home writing desks andThis article proposes a new perspective on avant-garde travel writing through the lens of scientific field work, investigating these new writing techniques in Boris Pil’niak’s expedition prose. In the 1920s, the researching writer represents a hidden, but influential counterpart to the widely propagated figure of the working writer. While the author as producer combines word and deed in an operative act, the author as researcher investigates the production of knowledge. This entails revising the centrality of facts. Literature as artistic research subverts factography by going beyond the horizons of veristic data registration to include uncharted realms and vague possibilities. This exploration leads to specific genres: the author as researcher tries his hand at a kind of laboratory text, a prolific genre at the intersection of testing equipment, recording media, and hypothetical thought. Not confined to a sterile lab, avant-garde writer-researchers, as members of research expeditions, oscillate between their home writing desks and the remote depths of the emerging USSR. At the same time, they explore writing practices situated between data acquisition, sampling, fact-finding, observation and recording.…
Author details: | Susanne SträtlingGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ruslit.2019.04.012 |
ISSN: | 0304-3479 |
ISSN: | 1878-3678 |
Title of parent work (English): | Russian Literature |
Subtitle (English): | Boris Pil’niak Samples the Arctic Sea |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Place of publishing: | Amsterdam |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Year of first publication: | 2019 |
Publication year: | 2019 |
Release date: | 2021/05/12 |
Tag: | Arctic |
Volume: | 103 |
Number of pages: | 21 |
First page: | 283 |
Last Page: | 303 |
Organizational units: | Philosophische Fakultät / Institut für Slavistik |
DDC classification: | 8 Literatur / 80 Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft / 800 Literatur und Rhetorik |