“Remembering Poland and Eastern Europe” has the aim of examining \nrepresentations of Eastern Europe in fiction, autobiographies, and \nmemoirs from the 1980s to the present, written in English by female \nauthors who emigrated from the region, or whose parents emigrated after \nWW II. The complex history of this region puts high demands on \ncontextualization of literary analyses, and so the project begins more \nnarrowly with an initial focus on work produced by women writers of the \npost-WW II Polish diaspora. A series of 3-4 articles on such works is \nproposed for the first two years of the project, after which the scope \nwill widen to include writing by other Eastern European diasporic \nwriters. A secondary aim is thus to contribute to the building of \ncompetence in the English-language literature of the Eastern European \nand Baltic diasporas, both at S\u00f6dert\u00f6rn and beyond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The project \nwill examine the work of a neglected group of women writers, including \nEva Hoffman, Lisa Appignanesi, Nina Fitzpatrick, Ewa Kuryluk, Jasia \nReichardt, Eva Stachniak, and Anne Michaels. By grouping together \nadmittedly heterogeneous writers, and in the last stage extending the \nscope to diasporic writing from Eastern Europe, this project seeks to \nanalyze a range of representations and theoretical concerns which might \notherwise be overlooked in critical conversations in English. The focus \nis on literary renditions of emergent ethnic identities, and on \ndiasporic or exilic affect, including nostalgia. What images of war-time\n and post-war Poland, what understandings of Eastern Europe emerge? How \ndo writers remember exilic and diasporic experiences? What roles are \nplayed by nostalgia, by personal and cultural memory, and by history in \nliterary treatments of Poland, Eastern Europe, and adopted countries? \nHow do women writers think and feel about returns to homelands? How is \nethnicity constituted\u2014if it is\u2014in new locations? How does ethnicity \ntravel? How are intimate relationships affected by acts of migration? \nHow have the events of 1989 affected literary understandings of the \nregion, and how have they affected the self-understandings of these \nwriters? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A literary study, the project will nevertheless draw \nbroadly on theories of ethnicity, gender, and cultural memory, as well \nas on specific theoretical articulations such as postmemory (Hirsch), \nnostalgia (Boym, Dancus), and affect (Ahmad, Dancus, Matt).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-622","project","type-project","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n