The 2016 Hongor Oulanoff Memorial Lecture will take place on October 7th at 5:30pm in theHayes Cape Room located in the Ohio Union. Dr. Michael Finke (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) will present "Pleonastic Pilnyak" (abstract below).
"This talk will bring together a couple of areas of interest in the work of Boris Pilnyak, which converge in the question of repetition. I'll be focusing on the narratives involving flight--his own agitpolet , the flight that culminates his first Japan travelogue, and Ivan Moskva--and also on his two travel narratives about Japan. We'll discuss features of his writings that became the bases of vigorous criticism of Pilnyak by leading critics: the cheap tricks of his imitative ornamental prose, and the way he reuses or redoes his published writings, whether due to economic, aesthetic, facile mythopoetic, political, or other exigencies. Is there something there still worth our attention?"
Reception to follow.
