Description:
Having exploded on the margins of Europe, Chornobyl marked the end of the Soviet Union and tied the era of postmodernism in Western Europe with nuclear consciousness. The Post-Chornobyl Library becomes a metaphor of a new Ukrainian literature of the 1990s, which emerges out of the Chornobyl nuclear trauma.
Brief description: Dr. Tamara Hundorova is Chair of the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Associate of Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She is the author of Транзитна культура. Симптоми постколоніальної травми (2013) [Transit Culture: Symptoms of Postcolonial Trauma], Кіч і література. Травестії (2008) [Kitsch and Literature: Travesties], ПроЯвлення слова. Дискурсія раннього українського модернізму (1997; 2009) [The Emerging Word: The Discourse of Early Ukrainian Modernism], Femina melancholica. Стать і культура в гендерній утопії Ольги Кобилянської (2002) [Femina melancholica. Sex and Culture in the Gender Utopia of Olha Kobylianska], Франко - не Каменяр (2006) [Franko Not the Stonecutter] and numerous articles on Ukrainian literature, modernism, postmodernism, gender studies, postcolonial trauma and kitsch. She taught at Toronto University, Harvard Summer School, Greifswald Ukrainicum, Ukrainian Free University, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and Kyiv National University. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, a Petro Jacyk Distinguished Fellowship (Harvard University), a visiting professorship at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center (Hokkaido University) and the MUNK School of Global Affairs (Toronto University), and a fellowship at Monash University (Australia).
Review Quotes:
"Its depth of analysis and breadth of engagement with theorists and practitioners of postmodernism worldwide make this book essential reading for anyone studying the tectonic literary and cultural shifts that took place in Eastern Europe with the collapse of the Soviet state. ... Always insightful and often provocative, the essays of The Post-Chornobyl Library represent, in this reviewer's estimation, literary and cultural criticism at its best. Now available to the Anglophone audiences in a highly readable translation by Sergiy Yakovenko, they will be of great value to students and scholars of Ukrainian literature and culture, of postmodernism, and of Eastern Europe as a region."
--Oleksandra Wallo, University of Kansas, Russian Review