Writing Postcommunism: Towards a Literature of the East European Ruins

[David Williams]

Dear colleagues,

My new book, *Writing Postcommunism: Towards a Literature of the East
European Ruins *(Palgrave, 2013), may be of interest to some of you.

*Abstract*
Moving through the elegiac ruins of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav
disintegration, *Writing Postcommunism* explores literary evocations of the
pervasive disappointment and mourning that have marked the postcommunist
twilight. With particular reference to the writings of Croatian émigré
Dubravka Ugrešić, as well as to those, amongst others, of Milan Kundera,
Clemens Meyer, Ingo Schulze, Jáchym Topol, and Christa Wolf, it is argued
that a significant body of postcommunist literature is underpinned and
scarred by the semantic field of ruins: melancholia and nostalgia, presence
and absence, pride and shame, and not least, remembering and forgetting.
Taken together, the writings considered suggest a post-1989 'literature of
the ruins', an amorphous, anti-formative framework that also dramatically
illuminates the post-1989 ruins of east European literature itself - what
remains when, as György Konrád put it, 'something is over'.

Further information, including a free download of the Introduction, can be
found at the Palgrave Macmillan website:
http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=669315

*Author Note*
David Williams is the translator of Dubravka Ugrešić's *Karaoke
Culture*(2011) and
*Europe in Sepia* (forthcoming 2014), and also of Miljenko Jergović's *Mama
Leone* (2012). He completed his doctorate in Comparative Literature at the
University of Auckland, and has taught at the Universities of East
Sarajevo, Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Auckland. He has been a visiting scholar
at the Leipzig Centre for the History and Culture of East-Central Europe
(GWZO), and is presently a DAAD postdoctoral fellow in the Department of
Slavic Literatures at the University of Konstanz.

Best wishes,
David

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