Periodicals Unbound I: Communities across Borders

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores from various angles the role of periodicals in the transnational circulation of literature, which connected a range of locales within Eastern Europe, the West, and the Global South in the 1930s and during the Cold War. Among the journals featured in the presentations are the numerous foreign-language versions of the Soviet International Literature, emigre publications such as Grani or Novyi zhurnal, and the Czechoslovak Světová literatura. Panelists discuss how editors and translators operated in complex and at times ambivalent ideological contexts, how they navigated socialist cultural policy and geopolitical interests or used their journals to develop oppositional positions. The papers demonstrate that the literary journal with its long history emerges as a pliable media format that is particularly well suited to cross state boundaries and facilitate not only cultural exchange, but political solidarity and subversion.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Andrey Ridling, Ohio State U

Papers

• World Literature in Socialist Czechoslovakia: The Case of Světová Literatura - Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner, Ohio State U

• Contraband Manuscripts in Tamizdat Periodicals of the 1960s - Yasha Klots, CUNY Hunter College

• The Freelance International of Communist Literature: Translating for 'La Littérature Internationale' in Early Stalinism - Evgeniia Belskaia, U Paris Cité (France)

• Liberation and/as Occupation: The Rhetorics of Liberation and Editorial Policy of International Literature in 1939-1943 - Elena Ostrovskaya

Discussant

• Elena Zemskova, Independent Scholar