Brodsky abroad : empire, tourism, nostalgia /

Brodsky abroad : empire, tourism, nostalgia /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Turoma, Sanna.
Imprint:Madison, Wis. : University of Wisconsin Press, ©2010.
Description:1 online resource (xi, 292 pages)
Language:English
Subject:
Brodsky, Joseph, -- 1940-1996 -- Travel.
Brodsky, Joseph, -- 1940-1996.
Travel.
Electronic books.
Format: E-Resource Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11216475
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9780299236335
0299236331
029923634X
9780299236342
9780299236342
1282555359
9781282555358
9786612555350
6612555351
Digital file characteristics:data file
Notes:Includes bibliographical references (pages 271-283) and index.
English.
Print version record.
Summary:Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and honored with the Nobel Prize fifteen years later, poet Joseph Brodsky in many ways fit the grand tradition of exiled writer. But Brodsky's years of exile did not render him immobile: though he never returned to his beloved Leningrad, he was free to travel the world and write about it. In Brodsky Abroad, Sanna Turoma discusses Brodsky's poems and essays about Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, and Italy. Challenging traditional conceptions behind Brodsky's status as a leading emigre poet and major descendant of Russian and Euro-American modernism, she relocates the analysis of his travel texts in the context of contemporary travel and its critique. Turoma views Brodsky's travel writing as a response not only to his exile but also to the postmodern and postcolonial landscape that initially shaped the writing of these texts.
In his Latin American encounters, Brodsky exhibits disdain for third-world politics and invokes the elegiac genre to reject Mexico's postcolonial reality and to ironically embrace the romanticism of an earlier Russian and European imperial age. In an essay on Istanbul he assumes Russia's ambiguous position between East and West as his own to negotiate a distinct, and controversial, interpretation of Orientalism. And Venice, the emblematic tourist city, becomes the site for a reinvention of his lyric self as more fluid, hybrid, and cosmopolitan.
Brodsky Abroad reveals the poet's previously uncharted trajectory from alienated dissident to celebrated man of letters and offers new perspectives on the geopolitical, philosophical, and linguistic premises of his poetic imagination.
"Thoroughly researched and elegantly written, Brodsky Abroad takes works of the leading representatives of post-colonial and postmodern theory and applies them creatively to Brodsky's travel writings before and after exile to the West."--David M. Bethea University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"Instead of focusing on Brodsky's political martyrdom, Brodsky Abroad brings together concepts of travel and exile, for the well-known reason that Brodsky's emigration facilitated his freedom to travel across the globe."--Bozena Shallcross University of Chicago --Book Jacket.
Other form:Print version: Turoma, Sanna. Brodsky abroad. Madison, Wis. : University of Wisconsin Press, ©2010 9780299236342
Review by Choice Review

A gem of meticulous research, Turoma's poem-by-poem analysis of the travel writing of Russian transplant and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky adds to the growing literature on literary travel writing. Whereas postmodern and postcolonial analyses focus on the questions of national identity and belonging, travel writing--poems, travelogues, and essays--focuses on the lands writers traverse, either literally or in their imaginations. This literature opens up a serious aspect of the fate of man: that of constant traveler, the Everyman, the ephemeral apparition of living life as a valley of joy and tears, the Chaucerian, the Boccaccian narrator of the lands perceived. Firmly rooting her keen perceptions of the essence of Brodsky's writings in relationship to his Soviet and world experiences, Turoma (Univ. of Helsinki, Finland) extends the value of this already excellent book by including Russian originals along with English translations. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. D. Hutchins Buena Vista University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review

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