Women's Writing After the Fall

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course explores contemporary women’s writing in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, with particular attention to reception of Western feminism and critique of capitalist cultural markets. By reading and discussing short stories, poetry, novels, and essays from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Romania, the former Yugoslavia, and the Baltic countries from the time of transition, students engage with the complexity of attitudes and feelings that accompanied the political, economic and social changes in the region: far from an unambiguously positive embrace of democracy and free markets, many writers from the region express deep anxiety about the loss of a culturally distinct past and a shared multi-ethnic and multi-national culture, alongside more positive feelings of relief at the apparent dissolution of East-West borders and boundaries, of limitations on freedom of expression, etc. The syllabus includes four Nobel Prize-winning authors and creative assignments that help students better understand literary form.