Studies in Slavic Cultures, call for papers

[Irina Anisimova]

Studies in Slavic Cultures XI
Everyday Life
Deadline: January 15

Studies in Slavic Cultures, the graduate student journal of the
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of
Pittsburgh, is accepting papers from current graduate students for its
2012 issue. The theme of this issue is “Everyday Life.”  We welcome
papers on this topic, which can include interpretative (semiotic,
anthropological, or sociological) approaches to the practices of
everyday life in Slavic cultures as well as the analyses of
representations of everyday life in different artistic media, such as
literature, visual arts, and performance.

In the context of Russia and Eastern Europe, the practices and
representations of everyday life have been highly contested through
the processes of secularization of Slavic cultures.  New secular
customs, often imported as in the case of the Petrine reforms, clashed
with traditional cultural norms, and led to the scrutiny and
aestheticization of everyday life.  The tension between the
representation and transformation of daily reality was central to
nineteenth-century critical realism; the ascetic practices of radical
political cells also reflected a desire for transcendence of everyday
life.  The twentieth-century revolutionary promise of socialist utopia
developed the problematization of everyday life in new directions.
Modernists throughout the Slavic world imagined the transformation of
private life, while post-revolutionary societies attempted to mold the
everyday life of the collective.  As a result, in Russia and Soviet
Union, the term “byt”—often considered untranslatable—became a
particularly loaded concept, a protean signifier of throwback or
bourgeois habits and, in late Soviet period, of soul-deadening
collective practices like queuing.  More recently, the fall of the
Soviet bloc and the transition from socialist to capitalist societies
have dramatically affected everyday experiences in Eastern Europe.

Possible topics on the role of everyday life in Slavic cultures
include, but are not limited to:

-The rituals and mythologies of everyday life
-Everyday life and performance
-Everyday life in the period of transition,
-The transformation of the everyday life in modernism and socialist realism
-Everyday life and revolution
-Everyday life and dystopia and utopia
-Everyday life and nostalgia.

Queries and submissions should be sent to Irina Anisimova, Natalie
Ryabchikova, and Elise Thorsen at sisc at pitt.edu.

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