Call for papers: Deadline Extension: Post-Dissident Studies: Between Collaboration and Dissent in Central Europe

[daniel pratt]

Please Distribute

*
*

*Post-Dissident Studies: Between Collaboration and Dissent in Central Europe
*

A Graduate Student Conference, September 20th – 22nd, 2013

Sponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard
University



In the years since the fall of Communism in East Germany, Central Europe,
and the Soviet Union, a new space has opened for critical approaches to
oppositional, dissident, and unofficial literature. Not only do new
historical sources such as state archives contextualize the process of
creating literary texts within Communist states, but the twenty years since
the collapse of the Soviet Bloc provide necessary critical distance.
Defining writers exclusively in terms of their opposition obscures nuanced
views of the philosophical, aesthetic, and political constructions offered
in their texts.  This conference sets out to establish a new vision of
evaluating official, unofficial, and semi-official authors, texts, and
media that challenges the rhetoric of a dissident and non-dissident binary.



Panels will be organized around time periods or on thematic bases grouping
scholars who work on similar concepts in different national literatures.
Papers establishing connections between East German authors and writers
located beyond the GDR’s borders are especially encouraged.



Possible topics include:

·      Reimagining the history of official, non-official, and unofficial
literature in the Communist space

·      The responsibilities of the writer to various publics and audiences

·      Is dissident literature a reliable historical source?

·      Representation of dictatorship in experimental fiction e.g. Herta
Müller, Monika Maron, or György Dragoman

·      Creative collaboration amongst groups of writers such as the
Prenzlauerberg poets in Berlin or the Lianozovo poets near Moscow

·      Post-1989 literary representations of the Communist era from within
the Eastern Bloc

·      New perspectives on the institutions of censorship

·      Reappraisals of author collaboration with governmental cultural
regimes

·      Engagement with Socialist Realism, Marxism-Leninism, and revisionism
in the Eastern Bloc’s cultural sphere

·      Projection of a history of dissidence onto earlier writers, e.g.
Heine, Kafka, or Dostoevsky



Abstracts of 200 – 250 words and a paragraph-long biography including
expected date of PhD should be sent to PostDissidentStudies at gmail.com by
July 1st, 2013



Conference Co-Chairs

Nicole Burgoyne, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard
University

nburgoyn at fas.harvard.edu

 Daniel Pratt, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University
of Chicago
dpratt at uchicago.edu

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/seelang/attachments/20130618/b623f0a2/attachment.html>