Alexander Zholkovsky, Kathleen Parthé (Editor)
Themes and Texts: Toward a Poetics of Expressiveness.
Cornell University Press, 1984. First edition. Translation from the Russian by the author. Foreword by Jonathan Culler. 0801415055 300 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.25" x 9.25", is bound in brown cloth, with stamped black lettering to spine. Book is like new. Dust jacket exhibits light shelfwear, with sunning to spine panel. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"This book makes available, for the first time in English, a comprehensive of the writings of the important semiotician and critic Alexander Zholkovsky. Consisting of a dozen essays that appeared between 1962 and 1980, and supplemented by an essay-length introduction written especially for inclusion here, "Themes and Texts" develops and applies the theory formulated by Zholkovsky and Yury Schleglov: a poetics  of expressiveness.
Through analysis of literary works in a number of different languages and modes, Zholkovsky attempts in these essays to define the devices by which themes are given expressive force. The result is a system that permits us to describe the relationship between theme and text. The essays in this book treat a wide range of texts and topics, from an aphorism of Bertrand Russell's, a Somali proverb, and a lesson in film making by Eisenstein, to the poetic worlds of Pasternak and Pushkin.
Zholkovsky's analyses should be seen not so much as interpretations but rather as explorations of a metalanguage, a special vocabulary for naming the devices by which themes are given artistic expressiveness and for analyzing as "motifs" the invariants that make up a poetic world."