Ghosts from the Bloodlands: Eastern European Gothic and the War

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

This roundtable will focus on recent cultural productions from Eastern Europe (literature and film) related to war (mainly, World War I and World War II, but also touching on Russia’s present imperialist war against Ukraine) that display Gothic sensibility. The roundtable participants and the chair will explore dislocating, traumatic war experiences and re-imagined warfare imbricated with the Gothic literary modality, which becomes instrumental in communicating the ineffable complexities of the conditions in the trenches and on battlefields, their foundational violence, haunting horrors, and dehumanizing effects in the works of contemporary (post-2000) Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish Ukrainian/Russian authors (Dmytro Bilyi, Artem Chekh, Anna Dziewit-Meller, Margarita Khemlin, and Szczepan Twardoch) and earlier Polish and Russian/Soviet filmmakers (Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrzej Żuławski). In particular, we are interested in the relationships between transformative states that the war Gothic (as a subgenre of Gothic fiction) demonstrates: the decomposition and destruction of identity, the body, and the environment, as well as the dissolution of boundaries between the living and the dead, human and machine. The roundtable format has been chosen to free up time for the participants to discuss potential research collaboration, based on this topic (a prospective edited volume or a special issue of a journal).

Sub Unit

• Literature: 21st Century

Chair

• Maryna Romanets, U of Northern British Columbia (Canada)

Roundtable Members

• Jessica Jensen Mitchell, Harvard U

• Svitlana Krys, MacEwan U (Canada)

• Yuliya Minkova, Virginia Tech

• Kate Tomashevskaya, U of Southern California

• Miriam Tripaldi, U of Chicago

Session Manager

• Maureen Waters O'Neill, Sorbonne Nouvelle