Bowstring

On the Dissimilarity of the Similar

By: Viktor Shklovsky, Shushan Avagyan (Translator)

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Paperback | 13 October 2011

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"Myths do not flow through the pipes of history," writes Viktor Shklovsky, "they change and splinter, they contrast and refute one another. The similar turns out to be dissimilar." Published in Moscow in 1970 and appearing in English translation for the first time, Bowstring is a seminal work, in which Shklovsky redefines estrangement (ostranenie) as a device of the literary comparatist--the "person out of place," who has turned up in a period where he does not belong and who must search for meaning with a strained sensibility. As Shklovsky experiments with different genres, employing a technique of textual montage, he mixes autobiography, biography, memoir, history, and literary criticism in a book that boldly refutes mechanical repetition, mediocrity, and cultural parochialism in the name of art that dares to be different and innovative. Bowstring is a brilliant and provocative book that spares no one in its unapologetic project to free art from conventionality.

Industry Reviews

A rambling, digressive stylist, Shklovsky throws off brilliant aper us on every page. . . . Like an architect s blueprint, [he] lays bare the joists and studs that hold up the house of fiction. --Michael Dirda
Shklovsky is a disciple worthy of Sterne. He has appropriated the device of infinitely delayed event, of the digression helplessly promising to return to the point, and of disguising his superbly controlled art with a breezy nonchalance. But it is not really Sterne that Shklovsky sounds like: it is an intellectual and witty Hemingway. --Guy Davenport
The works of Viktor Shklovsky are so appropriate to our contemporary situation as to seem to have been written for us. His writings do precisely what he has said it is art s goal to do: they restore . . . sensation of the world, they resurrect things and kill pessimism. --Lyn Hejinian

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