Islands in the Ocean: The Adventure of a Word Between Russian and American Poetries (International Conference “American and Russian Poetries. Links and Circulations”, Université de Toulouse, 2–5 June 2021)

Abstract

The article provides an overview of the conference “American and Russian Poetries. Links and Circulations”. The conference was held at the University of Toulouse from June 2 to June 5, 2021, virtually and was organized by Americanists, professors at the University of Toulouse, D. Rumeau and C. Gheerardyn. The conference attracted scholars from the USA, France, Israel, Russia (including scholars from Lomonosov Moscow State University Lomonosov, the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, etc.). During the conference, a number of papers touched upon the issues of reception and “transfer” between poetic cultures. These papers would concern not so much a passive “transfer” of a literary phenomenon from one culture to another, but rather an active process of transferring, or transcoding the phenomenon through an intertext already existing in another culture. Apart from topics related to issues of reception and metamorphoses of cultural translation, during the conference, the contrast between Russian and American poetic traditions was questioned as a contrast between the tradition of “expression”, psychologism, and the tradition of “description”, a formal experiment. This opposition was coined by the Imagist poet J. Cournos, a Russian émigré, also known as Ioan Grigor’yevich Korshun. A number of speakers disputed the rigid division of Kurnos, drawing attention to (1) the similarity of conceptual schemes for comprehending experience in the poems of Russian and American poets, (2) a formal experiment in Russian futurism and the development of a theoretical vocabulary for describing form in Russian formalism, (3) the influence of Russian futurism on the American neo-avant-garde. The influence of Russian futurism and Russian formalism on American poetry was traced on the example of the Language School phenomenon.