Teichoscopy is a theatrical means of communicating occurrences that happen offstage. A figure, commonly subaltern and anonymous, climbs to an elevated position to report what it sees from this vantage point while the leading figure remains below to hear. In thus visibly inverting the positions of power on stage, teichoscopy can not only call into question social and political hierarchies, it also serves to comment on the central tragic notion of the ‘fall of kings’ ...

Are we witnessing the transition from alphabetic to digital literacy? But what does "literacy" mean? Going back to the discovery of the difference between orality and literacy in the 1960s and 1970s, we find a real discovery - the difference between oral and written language - combined with a problematic narrative: The supremacy of literal to oral cultures. To avoid this ideology we should consider orality and literacy as the two ends of a continuum. ...

In “'I am fragile and small'”: Versions of Masculinity in Soviet Unofficial Poetics," Ainsley Morse will examine the presentation of masculinity (usually that of the lyric speaker) in the work of several unofficial poets of the late Soviet period. As an institution, unofficial literature occupied a powerless position vis-a-vis officially published literature; yet, unofficial poets drew on the tradition of predecessors including Vladimir Mayakovsky and Daniil Kharms to construct a lyric presence that combined exaggerated weakness (“loserdom”) ...