Diary, Document, Testimony: From Shalamov’s Stories to Ukrainian War Diaries

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Exploration of the genres of autofiction, such as documentary prose, diary, and graphic diary: what are their strategies of truthfulness and authenticity? Does the documentary intent effect their temporal perspectives and the constructions of the self? Shalamov’s stories’ combination of novelty, precision, and truthfulness represent the author’s attempts to write that which would be effective but “would not be literature.” The diary, the most prominent genre of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, is online and public, it modifies the conventions of the genre by subordinating the traditional assumptions of privacy and secrecy to the documentary and testimonial value of a witness account. The graphic war diary participates in the ongoing war from a chronocentric perspective (as opposed to the prevailing ‘topocentric’ one that focuses on territorial disputes) and explores the conflicting temporal perspectives as discourse and counter-discourse of power.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 21st Century

Chair

• Valeria Sobol, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Papers

• 'Belief in an Open Wound': Reading the Story-Documents of Varlam Shalamov - Emily Stetson Van Buskirk, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey

• 'We-Narrative': Ukrainian War Diary and the Fashioning of the National Subject - Lyudmila Parts, McGill U (Canada)

• Z for 'Zeit': Ukrainian Graphic Diaries versus the Kremlin’s Weaponization of Time - Alexandre Zaezjev, McGill U (Canada)

Discussant

• Benjamin Paloff, U of Michigan