An experiment with language. Is it an object cultivated in poetic laboratories where entry is locked for mere mortals? And what do language scholars think about it? Specialists in language and literature studies interested in linguistic innovation and experimental poetry will find answers to these questions in Vladimir Feshchenko’s book. The study investigates various strategies of radical linguistic creativity in Russian and American experimental writing of the 20th century and explores cases of contemporary ‘language-oriented’ and ‘trans-language’ poetry. It is a comparative examination of two national avant-garde cultures, but also a juxtaposition of the relationships that Russian and American avant-garde poetics had with linguistic ideas of their times. The monograph may serve as a wonderful introduction to the entire field of ‘linguistic poetics of the avant-garde’.

An outstanding and carefully documented study of Russian and American language-centred poetry of the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, and an important contribution to comparative linguistic poetics.

Contemporary processes of globalization have had a profound impact on cultural production and dissemination both intra- and cross-culturally. The dissemination of cultures on a global scale has led to multiple and complex effects, among them the formation of radical new modes of cultural interaction, transcultural flows, and hybridized knowledges, forms not easily understandable in terms of traditional models of discrete national or ethnic cultures/subcultures. Transcultural Experiments develops new scholarly and creative strategies out of this intersection of cultural traditions, specifically in Russia and the United States. Ellen E. Berry and Mikhail N. Epstein define and enact a transcultural method as an alternative to the legacies of cultural divisions and hegemony that have dominated both Western and Second Worlds. The book introduces a system of original concepts and genres of writing that will help in mapping twenty-first century global culture: 'transculture' (vs. multiculturalism), 'interference' (vs. difference), 'potentiation' (vs. deconstruction), ethics of imagination, and collective improvisation. The authors make a revolutionary argument in cultural studies that will be of profound interest to anyone concerned with finding new modes of intercultural communication between the former First and Second Worlds.

Prominent Moscow poet Evgeny Bunimovich selected representative work from forty-four living Russian poets born after 1945 to be translated and published in this bilingual edition. The collection ranges from the mordant post-Soviet irony of Igor Irteniev to the fresh voices of poets like Marianna Geide and Anna Russ -- young women just beginning to make themselves heard. The book includes the work of Booker Prize winner Sergey Gandlevsky and several winners of the Andrey Bely Prize and Brodsky Fellowships. Most of these poems, and many of the poets, have previously been unpublished in the West.