Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Williams, David, 1976-

Title Writing Postcommunism : towards a literature of the East European ruins / David Williams
Published [Basingstoke] : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Copies

Description 1 online resource
Series Palgrave studies in modern European literature
Palgrave studies in modern European literature.
Contents Introduction: Exercises in Polysemy -- 1. 'The Citizen of a Ruin' -- 2. Unconditional Surrender and the Ruins of Berlin -- 3. Aporias, Impasses, and Ostalgia -- 4. Trammerliteratur Redux -- Epilogue: 'The Future Has No Future'
Summary Moving through the elegiac ruins of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav disintegration, "Writing Postcommunism" explores literary evocations of the pervasive disappointment and mourning that have marked the postcommunist twilight. With particular reference to the writings of Croatian emigre Dubravka Ugresic, and those of Milan Kundera, Clemens Meyer, Ingo Schulze, J̀chym Topol, Christa Wolf, and others, it is argued that a significant body of postcommunist literature is underpinned and scarred by the semantic field of ruins: melancholia and nostalgia, presence and absence, pride and shame, and not least, remembering and forgetting. Taken together, the writings considered suggest a post-1989 'literature of the ruins', an amorphous, anti-formative framework that also dramatically illuminates the post-1989 ruins of east European literature itself -- what remains when, as Gy̲rgy Konr̀d put it, 'something is over'
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-228) and index
Notes Online resource; title from title details screen (Palgrave Connect, viewed August 27, 2013)
Subject East European literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism
Literary studies: from c 1900 -- c 1990 to c 2000 -- Eastern Europe.
Literary theory -- c 1990 to c 2000 -- Eastern Europe.
European history -- c 1990 to c 2000 -- Eastern Europe.
Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 -- c 1990 to c 2000 -- Eastern Europe.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- Eurpoean -- Eastern.
Literature.
East European literature
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781137330086
1137330082
9781137330079
1137330074