2025 Theses Doctoral

Violence as Device: The Poetics and Politics of Russophone Literary Culture

Kim, Yulia

This dissertation brings together Russian Formalist literary theory, selected works in critical theory, and close readings in Russophone verbal culture, and investigates the relationship between violence, power, and literature in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. It builds on the work of the Russian Formalism literary criticism movement, not simply as a method of literary analysis but as a historically situated and politically implicated way of thinking about power and language. Formalists’ theoretical insights are placed in dialogue with Georges Sorel’s reflections on myth and political violence, Walter Benjamin’s concept of Gewalt, Michel Foucault’s analysis of power as governmentality, and theories of mass cultural production of Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.

Each chapter stages a triangulation between Russian Formalist literary theory, critical theory, and a close reading of a literary text or discursive object. The theoretical findings of this dissertation present a novel and productive approach to addressing the question of violence and power in verbal culture—one that is sensitive to the complexities of artistic representation and attentive to its impact. In doing so, the study contributes to ongoing debates about the entanglements of literature with politics, including its potential role in systems of repression and propaganda, and brings to these concerns an account of how the very fabric of literature—its poetics—is tied up in power dynamics.