Course Description
Summary
In this course, we will examine contemporary literature and cinema in the “other” Europe, exposing the intricacies of daily life in a region where the past is always present. The cinematic and literary texts will be drawn from the former Yugoslavia and the successor states of East Bloc nations in post-Communist Europe. We will consider the work of iconoclastic writers and film directors such as Dubravka Ugrešić, Semezdin Mehmedinović, Paweł Pawlikowski, Dorota Masłowska, Aleksandr Sokurov, Vladimir Sorokin, Herta Müller, and the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient Olga Tokarczuk. We will also discuss the more detached yet no less poignant perspective on political events by expatriate artists such as the Bosnian Aleksandar Hemon and the Czech Milan Kundera. We will conclude the course with an examination of ascendant feminist and independent socialist movements in the arts, devoting particular attention to literary and cinematic push-backs against the recent rise of ethno-nationalism in Eastern Europe.
