literature

27 articles tagged with literature were found.

Post-communist memory in the negative

This essay takes the novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić as a starting point for a discussion of why the notion of a post-Yugoslav or post-communist cultural memory seems to be a contradiction in terms. The manifest impossibility of forming a collective post-Yugoslav memory provokes a reflection on how cultural and collective memory has been used in post-communist Eastern Europe to historify the communist past, which further has served the revival of a nationalist agenda. Ugrešić offers a counter memory, if we understand the term from Foucault as something that escapes the forming of identities. Finally, I suggest the notion of negative memory, as introduced by Reinhardt Koselleck, as a more apposite term for approaching memory in the post-communist sphere and in the unfolding catastrophes of the modern world.

Essay by Tora Lane December 11, 2023

Upside down on horseback. The trickster Pippi Longstocking in the GDR

A sketch for the cover of the second East German edition to Pippi Langstrumpf (1988) showing a girl standing on her head on horseback is the starting point for this article. It was drawn by Cornelia Ellinger, only one year before the fall of the Berlin wall. The sketch becomes a starting point for a discussion of humor and materiality in the reception of Pippi in the GDR.

Essay by Lisa Källström December 11, 2023

What is post-Soviet literature today?    

For large groups in the East, the fall of the Soviet Union was like a floodgate opening through which history flowed in. The period following 1991 has been described as transitional, and the literature as post-Soviet. In the panel discussion “Fast forward – Rewind” at the Stockholm Literature Fair at Kulturhuset in December 4, 2021, questions such as how this transition can be understood in retrospect, and how we are to talk about Russian literature of today, were addressed.

By Maria Mårsell December 14, 2021

The missing of history in heritage H.G. Adler's novel The Wall

The property of the disappeared first becomes mere “things” without name, use, or status. Then they turn into museum artifacts of ethnographic, aesthetic, or historical value (at least those of them that are not stolen by the “conquerors” nor rejected by the experts). Then, again, with the collapse of the museum project, what used to be displayed as cultural heritage turns again into “just things”. They burden their custodians who only wish to get rid of them.

Essay by Irina Sandomirskaja December 30, 2019

Gone Missing Books and their owners in the siege of Leningrad

The book lovers, collectors, and dealers of the siege were moving antiquarian books on strollers and sleds, as they had done with dead bodies several months earlier, thus reorganizing the devastated spaces of the changed city. From the “vacant” apartments of missing people, books that materially represented material and symbolic values of the past were running through — and up against — a new reality, a contact or collision that engendered new forms of inquiry and of collaboration between past and present

Essay by Polina Barskova November 21, 2019

“One must do one’s best to undermine the system”

Tomas Venclova in a conversation with Stefan Ingvarsson on literature, Lithuania, and being a historical optimist in Europe today.

By Stefan Ingvarsson November 21, 2019

Exploring the topography of the power play. By concentrating on the periphery

Movers and Shakers of Soviet Ukrainian culture in the 1920s–1930s, “Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge. State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine”, Mayhill C. Fowler, University of Toronto Press, 2017.

By Yuliya Yurchuk September 6, 2018

The Magic of Moomin

The conference on “Moomins and the Others”, was held in honor of the 100th anniversary of Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomin magic.

By Sara Granath April 29, 2015

in the russian translation zone COMPREHENSIBILITY COEXISTS WITH FOREIGNIZATION

“Translation in Russian Contexts: Transcultural, Translingual and Transdisciplinary Points of Departure”, hosted June 3–7 by the Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies (UCRS), brought together scholars and practitioners of translation from Europe, Russia, and North America to Sweden, a central point between Western Europe and Russia.

By Sara Feldman October 20, 2014

Bakhtin and carnivalesque culture today

Whether comic, violent, brutal, or burlesque, Bakhtin’s explorations of cultural communication today appeal to linguists and literary theorists; but also to artists, musicians, and scholars in education, Slavic languages, postcolonial studies, and many other fields.

By Charlotte Bydler October 9, 2014