Women’s Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (Vol I)
Women’s Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (Vol I)
Contributor(s): Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru (Editor), Mădălina Nicolaescu (Editor), Helen Lawton Smith (Editor)
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Language and Literature Studies, Gender Studies, Studies of Literature, Sociology
Published by: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti
Keywords: Eastern European women; post-socialist period; Eastern European women writers;
Summary/Abstract: This volume springs partially from a wish to fill a gap in knowledge: Eastern and Central European countries know little about each other’s literatures. School curricula in the region include ‘the world classics’ but, with few exceptions, fail to refer to literature produced in the neighbouring countries. If we adopt a wide definition o f w hat E astern Europe means (which this volume does), there is one important exception to this rule: the presence of classic Russian literature by authors of indisputable fame such as Tolstoy, Pushkin and Dostoevsky. Promoted by political dogma that was initially shaped by the dictates of Soviet Russia and hence generally favourable to all things Russian, the Russian classics w ere widely read in communist governed countries. There are also discrete exceptions from the literatures of other countries - Mickiewicz, Sienkiewicz, Kafka, and Hasek for example - however the reading audience can seldom place such works within an appropriate frame of reference, that is, within the social and literary histories from which they emerged. The reason is ignorance, not always of the works, but of the context around them. This can be attributed to the isolation of national cultures which was encouraged by the communist regime in some countries in the region, and a levelling of differences within the all-inclusive universalist discourse of communism itself.
- Print-ISBN-10: 973-737-054-6
- Page Count: 184
- Publication Year: 2005
- Language: English
Julia Kristeva and the History of Bulgarian Women’s Literature: Narratives of Transposition
Julia Kristeva and the History of Bulgarian Women’s Literature: Narratives of Transposition
(Julia Kristeva and the History of Bulgarian Women’s Literature: Narratives of Transposition)
- Author(s):Miglena Nikolchina
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Gender Studies, Bulgarian Literature
- Page Range:19-35
- No. of Pages:17
- Keywords:transposition; Elisaveta Bagriana; Dora Gabe; Bulgarian singing; mother;
- Summary/Abstract:In what follows I will try to outline the specific characteristics that defined and established Bulgarian w omen’s literary history in the light of Julia Kristeva’s theoretical preoccupations. I believe that the success of the Bulgarian literary ‘mothers ’ Dora Gabe (1886-1983) and Elisaveta Bagriana (1893-1991) as producers of women’s literary history is a vital element of some of Kristeva’s major theoretical concerns. From this point of view, Kristeva is a direct descendent (‘the faithful daughter’, to quote ‘Descendent’, one of Bagriana’s poems) - in a different language and in a different form of discourse - o f her Bulgarian mothers. And yet, my reading of Gabe and Bagriana is Kristevan - and hence makes them the product rather than the antecedent of Kristeva. This clearly suggests a circularity, which I will resolve here by simply surrendering temporal considerations. I will turn instead to the narrative (the unfolding in time) o f a spatial operation that has been described by Kristeva as transposition.
- Price: 4.50 €
‘Oriental Town in the Plain’. Ana Blandiana’s Totalitarian ‘Other’
‘Oriental Town in the Plain’. Ana Blandiana’s Totalitarian ‘Other’
(‘Oriental Town in the Plain’. Ana Blandiana’s Totalitarian ‘Other’)
- Author(s):Roxana Oltean
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Gender Studies, Bulgarian Literature
- Page Range:37-51
- No. of Pages:15
- Keywords:Balkans; regional identities; totalöitarianism; inner emigration;
- Summary/Abstract:Recent critical investigations into representations of Eastern Europe, whether based on a historical investigation of cultural clichés or on contemporary appreciations of the area, often focus on the predominance of the image of the Orient to signify what is perceived as alien to the Western observer. Blandiana’s image of the Oriental Town moreover captures both exotic spectre and totalitarian dystopia, feeding perhaps on a notion of Oriental despotism. An investigation of the convergence of the ‘Oriental’ and the ‘totalitarian’ model reveals that it is possible to argue that the Orient and the totalitarianism it signifies illustrates in retrospect the multiple binds o f a dystopian past, with the Oriental Town a repository of otherness, but interlaced with utopias of the motherland. Both self and other, home and exile, motherly and totalitarian, Blandiana’s Oriental Town comes to embody the uncanny force of Bhabha’s comment on postcolonial encounters when ‘the “other” [...] emerges forcefully, within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and indigenously “between ourselves”. The construction or even the invention of ‘Eastern Europe’ (the ‘Balkans’) forms a particularly volatile centre of debate for ‘Eastern’ and Western’ (or indeed ‘East-West’) scholars. A common point of departure for the core of imagological studies of Eastern Europe/the Balkans seems to be that geography implies a more or less conscious ideological choice, and the focus of these works is rather on the mechanisms of perception and imposition which create a regional identity.
- Price: 4.50 €
(Dis)Regarding History: Slavenka Drakulić’s and Dubravka Ugrešić’s Female Voices from Croatia
(Dis)Regarding History: Slavenka Drakulić’s and Dubravka Ugrešić’s Female Voices from Croatia
((Dis)Regarding History: Slavenka Drakulić’s and Dubravka Ugrešić’s Female Voices from Croatia)
- Author(s):Vlatka Velčić
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Gender Studies, Croatian Literature
- Page Range:53-69
- No. of Pages:17
- Keywords:rape; exile;
- Summary/Abstract:My essay will explore two female writers from Croatia, Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić, in the light of the context outlined above. Both women represent rare female voices that were present in Croatian (and the former Yugoslavian) public life before the 1990s. They both continued to publish through the Civil Wars and their aftermath. My essay will specifically focus on the two most recent novels of these authors, Drakulić’s “S.: A Novel about the Balkans” and Ugrešić’s “The Museum o f Unconditional Surrender”, which reveal two different strategies in the fictionalization of female voices. Drakulić’s “S.”, about a Bosnian woman who gives birth as a result of rape, focuses on and attempts to recreate a ‘testimonio of a ‘real life’ victim. In her autobiographical, experimental novel, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Ugrešić manages not only to preserve the complexity of the women’s perspectives but also incorporates a meta-narrative of the postcolonial condition of exile.
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The Imperative of Moral Integrity in Tereza Boučkova’s »Indian Run«
The Imperative of Moral Integrity in Tereza Boučkova’s »Indian Run«
(The Imperative of Moral Integrity in Tereza Boučkova’s »Indian Run«)
- Author(s):Libora Oates-Indruchová
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Gender Studies, Czech Literature
- Page Range:71-88
- No. of Pages:18
- Keywords:Pavel Kohout; Václav Havel; dissident movement; charta 77;
- Summary/Abstract:It is the placement of the specificity of women’s experience within the political context that made the book stand out from other literary productions by women at the time of its publication, when questions of women’s identity and their different experience of political issues were not part of a general public discussion. Also, the book is a contribution to the emerging discourses of feminism in the post-1989 era. The dominant issue underlying the entire narrative is the woman-narrator’s effort to find her place in the world and her search for her ‘female identity’. Feminist concerns come to the fore especially in the narrator’s contextualization of her personal and moral experience: her world is often the world of the male dissident heroes/martyrs, here represented by her father and, presumably, by Vaclav Havel (called ‘Monologue’ in the narrative). She exposes the cost to the family, and women in particular, of both the communist system and the men’s pursuit of their ideals while disregarding their families. Although the daughter shares her father’s hatred of the system and herself signs Charter 77, she confronts his moral character and removes the aura of the dissident martyr from him. The final de-heroization comes in the post-1989 episodes, in which Monologue’s moral integrity with respect to the women in his life is brought into question. Boučkova, probably without much knowledge of feminist literature, highlights the fact that the personal is also political (while the political, in her account, is always personal, too)
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Dissenting Voices: Women’s Autobiographical Writing in Post-Soviet Latvia of the 1990s
Dissenting Voices: Women’s Autobiographical Writing in Post-Soviet Latvia of the 1990s
(Dissenting Voices: Women’s Autobiographical Writing in Post-Soviet Latvia of the 1990s)
- Author(s):Sandra Mešková
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Gender Studies, Latvian Literature
- Page Range:89-107
- No. of Pages:19
- Keywords:Agate Nesaule; Anita Liepa; Margita Gūtmane; Vizma Belševica; Inta Ezergaile; Latvian literature;
- Summary/Abstract:Taking into account the urge to rethink history and reconstruct cultural tradition in East-Central Europe, it should perhaps come as no surprise that, in the 1990s, autobiographical writing in this region has been a prominent factor in the change of the socio-cultural and literary paradigm. This is certainly true of Latvian literature in the 1990s, an era which marked a radical and decisive break with Soviet culture. The personal accounts of World War II - the central event of twentieth century European history that established a clear-cut division between East and West in Europe - produced the new vision of this turning point in Latvian history. Many of these narratives were written by women authors of the World War II generation. These women remembered the time before the war when Latvia was a newly established independent state, as the time of their childhood. They witnessed the beginning of World War II and the Soviet-German-Soviet occupation of Latvia at the beginning of the 1940s, as well as the end of half a century of Soviet occupation at the end of 1980s and the reconstruction of Latvian statehood at the beginning of the 1990s.
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Narratives of a Witness: Testimony and Polemic in the Work of Eva Kantůrková
Narratives of a Witness: Testimony and Polemic in the Work of Eva Kantůrková
(Narratives of a Witness: Testimony and Polemic in the Work of Eva Kantůrková)
- Author(s):Marlowe Miller
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Gender Studies, Czech Literature
- Page Range:109-126
- No. of Pages:18
- Keywords:Czech dissident identity; Jiřina Šiklova;
- Summary/Abstract:Entwined within the totalitarian system, defined by it through their opposition, Czech dissidents gained what Vaclav Havel has called the power of ‘living in truth’. In a system that was predicated on erasing the individual in the service of the whole and that was bound together by lies and ideology, the power of the dissident was his or her individual ethical action. The ‘definitional others’ that haunted the Soviet state, dissident writers were the ‘conscience of the nation’, to quote a phrase uttered by Jaroslav Seifert in 1956. The loss of these defining boundaries has been difficult for many in the dissident community. Few who lived through the twenty-plus years of cultural deepfreeze known as ‘Normalization’ can escape the Manichean polarities it facilitated. As a result of this and of the profound change that Verdery describes, many Czechs cling to an ‘us against them’ logic as they attempt to understand the new socio-political scene. Thus, many scholars have noted a rise in nationalism in post-socialist countries. As István Rév has argued, the rise in nationalism is a direct result of a collective desire to forget the recent past and place responsibility for it elsewhere: ‘If communism was the deed of outsiders, then the decades of communism could not be part of national history’ (168-69). Šiklova observes that most people cannot endure the complexity of the ‘meaningless present’ and thus they seek new dichotomies.
- Price: 4.50 €
Politics and the Discourse of Discontent: Female Representations in Herta Müller’s »The Land of Green Plums«
Politics and the Discourse of Discontent: Female Representations in Herta Müller’s »The Land of Green Plums«
(Politics and the Discourse of Discontent: Female Representations in Herta Müller’s »The Land of Green Plums«)
- Author(s):Valentina Glajar
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Gender Studies, German Literature
- Page Range:127-144
- No. of Pages:18
- Keywords:women under Romanian communism; abortion in communist Romania; Herta Müller;
- Summary/Abstract:In this essay, I focus on Müller’s representation of three female characters who illustrate different positions of women in the communist era. The novel’s first-person narrator, Müller’s alter ego, represents an ethnic German woman from an exclusively Banat-Swabian village. This character questions not only the ethnocentrism of ethnic Germans from Romania, but also exposes their involvement with National Socialism during World War II. In analyzing the characters of Tereza and Lola, I argue that they represent contrasting social types as they reflect newly created classes under communism: nomenklatura members and opportunists. Tereza enjoys the privileges of being the daughter of a high-ranking party official, while Lola, a poor woman from the south, becomes a party member in order to escape a life of poverty. In spite of her rare efforts to rationalize and understand the false premises of her position and the ideology she represents, Tereza does not have the freedom or the strength to switch sides. Lola, on the other hand, is expelled from the party post mortem because she commits suicide. Lola’s story brings the sensitive issue of abortion and the communist anti-abortion laws to the foreground as she herself allegedly induces abortion. By creating these characters and their auto-fictional stories, the author tries to discuss traumatic events such as persecution and a scrutinized existence under the eyes of the Securitate, as well as the far-reaching consequences o f a dictatorial regime.
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Transgressive Texts: Writing Women in Post-Soviet Russian Literature
Transgressive Texts: Writing Women in Post-Soviet Russian Literature
(Transgressive Texts: Writing Women in Post-Soviet Russian Literature)
- Author(s):Erin Collopy
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Gender Studies, Russian Literature
- Page Range:145-159
- No. of Pages:15
- Summary/Abstract:Writers of the late Soviet period used stylistic and linguistic innovation to challenge boundaries established by cultural convention and political requirements. It was not until the mid-eighties, the period of glasnost, that such experimental writing could be published in the Soviet Union. Through their subject matter and language usage, these texts broke not only the restrictions set by the Soviet government, but also social and cultural taboos. Perhaps more unexpected for the Soviet reading public was the emergence of experimental women writers such as Lyudmila Petrushevskaya and Tatyana Tolstaya, who, because of their gender, disturbed the public perhaps even more than Yuz Aleshkovsky or Venedikt Yerofeyev. While Petrushevskaya and Tolstaya are distinct in style and voice, they both subvert Soviet and Russian gender stereotypes in their depictions of women as sexual beings or as destructive mothers. More significantly, they depict women as authors of their own complex texts. Another talented experimental woman writer from this period who engages gender stereotypes in order to question and deconstruct them is Nina Sadur. The focus of the present paper is on the experimental techniques that these three writers employ in transgressing both literary and gender expectations.
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Living on Borderlines: Natasza Goerke’s The Book of Pates
Living on Borderlines: Natasza Goerke’s The Book of Pates
(Living on Borderlines: Natasza Goerke’s The Book of Pates)
- Author(s):Katarzyna Więckowska
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Gender Studies, Polish Literature
- Page Range:161-176
- No. of Pages:16
- Summary/Abstract:Since in our culture woman has been defined as the sign of difference, her presence within any narrative may function as a disruptive element, introducing a kind of (cultural) ambiguity which, as Bauman states, not only disturbs the constructed order but is an inevitable effect of the production of such an order - if not, in fact, the sine-qua-non condition of its existence (Bauman 132). In a gesture similar to that which changes the narratives of the ‘real’, the feminine voice re-writes the virginal space of blank pages, re-appropriating the pen traditionally envisaged as masculine. Yet in what ways is the woman’s voice different from a man’s one? Where does difference come through in writing? More specifically, how should we think the different ‘manner of spending, of valorizing the appropriated, of thinking what is not-the-same’ that Helene Cixous speaks of? This paper offers some answers to these questions by examining the work of a contemporary Polish woman writer, Natasza Goerke. The question that guides my exploration of her work concerns the nature of the return imagined by Cixous as ‘revenue’: if the woman’s voice stages a vocal recovery, analysis of the texts delineates some of the new tracts mapped on to the space of the homogenous (masculine?) narrative.
- Price: 4.50 €
List of Contributors
List of Contributors
(List of Contributors)
- Author(s):Author Not Specified
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Bibliography
- Page Range:177-180
- No. of Pages:4
- Price: 4.50 €