Totalitarianism And Literary Discourse

The collection Totalitarianism and Literary Discourse represents selected proceedings from the conference, Totalitarianism and Literary Discourse: 20th Century Experience, held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in October 2009. The Tbilisi conference pioneered scholarly inquiry into post-Soviet space, which evaluated political and cultural realia, emphasizing the challenges facing literature and culture in totalitarian strangleholds, various kinds of ideological diktat, their possible forms and consequences. The Soviet type of totalitarianism was especially accentuated. Decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, full comprehension of the process of Sovietization has become possible, and in the field of literary studies scholars have worked on a number of issues: assessing conceptual and motivational models of Soviet-period texts; demonstrating the reaction of literary discourse to intellectual terror and systematizing alternative models offered by anti-Soviet discourse; exhibiting the myths and stereotypes of the totalitarian epoch; and classifying literary genres. The collection Soviet Totalitarianism and Literary Discourse has gathered papers by scholars from almost all of the post-Soviet states, as well as of some other countries. It is a first attempt to solve the above-mentioned issues and offers a wide array of questions.

While these authors' political inclinations are well known and much discussed, previous studies have failed to adequately analyse the surrounding political circumstances that informed the specific utopian aspirations in each writer's works. Balancing a thorough knowledge of their works with an understanding of the political climate of the early twentieth century, Leon Surette provides new insights into the motivations and development of each writer's respective political postures. Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia examines their political commentary and their correspondence with each other from 1910s to the 1950s. Contextualizing their political thought in a world troubled by two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Bolshevik Revolution, Surette traces their shared concerns and the divergent responses of each of these figures in the historical moment to the risk they perceived of democracies becoming the pawns of commercial and industrial elites, leading to war and mindless consumerism. They all leaned toward autocratic solutions, though Pound and Lewis eventually admitted their error.

This volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas—political, intellectual, and institutional—the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse. For the first time anywhere, this collection analyzes all of the important theorists and major critical movements during a tumultuous ideological period in Russian history, including developments in émigré literary theory and criticism. Winner of the 2012 Efim Etkind Prize for the best book on Russian culture, awarded by the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia.

This set explores daily life in such totalitarian dictatorships as Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, China under Mao, and North Korea. Entries focus on compelling personal histories detailing the experiences of individuals in these regimes. The personal experiences are conveyed in such first-hand accounts as memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, and letters.

Soviet postcolonial studies is an emerging field of critical inquiry, with its locus of interest in colonial aspects of the Soviet experience in the USSR and beyond. The articles in this collection offer a postcolonial perspective on Baltic societies and cultures – that is, a perspective sensitive to the effects of Soviet colonialism. The colonial situation is typically sustained by the help of colonial discourses which carry the pathos of progress and civilization. In Soviet colonial discourse, the pathos of progress is presented in terms of communist value systems, which developed certain principles of the European Enlightenment and rearticulated them through Soviet ideology. This collection explores the establishment of Soviet colonial power structures, but also strategic continuities between Soviet and Tsarist rule and the legacy of Soviet colonialism in post-Soviet Baltics. Soviet norms and rules, imposed upon the Baltic borderlands, produced new forms of transculturation, gave birth to new cultural ‘authenticities,’ and developed complex entanglements of colonial, modern and national impulses. Analyses of colonial patterns in Soviet and post-Soviet Baltic societies helps bring us closer to understanding the Soviet legacy in the former Soviet borderlands and in present-day Russia. The chapters were originally published in a special issue of the Journal of Baltic Studies.

Om totalitarismen i det 20. århundredes europæiske litteratur - med eksempler af bl.a. Kafka, Orwell, Huxley og Koestler

The third volume of the collected papers of the ICLA congress "The Many Languages of Comparative Literature" includes contributions that focus on the interplay between concepts of nation, national languages, and individual as well as collective identities. Because all literary communication happens within different kinds of power structures - linguistic, economic, political -, it often results in fascinating forms of hybridity. In the first of four thematic chapters, the papers investigate some of the ways in which discourses can establish modes of thinking, or how discourses are in turn controlled by active linguistic interventions, whether in the context of the patriarchy, war, colonialism, or political factions. The second thematic block is predominantly concerned with hybridity as an aspect of modern cultural identity, and the cultural and linguistic dimensions of domestic life and in society at large. Closely related, a third series of papers focuses on writers and texts analysed from the vantage points of exile and exophony, as well as theoretical contributions to issues of terminology and what it means to talk about transcultural phenomena. Finally, a group of papers sheds light on more overtly violent power structures, mechanisms of exclusion, Totalitarianism, torture, and censorship, but also resistance to these forms of oppression. In addition to these chapters, the volume also collects a number of thematically related group sections from the ICLA congress, preserving their original context.