Delusions of Manure: Postcommunist Literature and the Myth of Disposable Culture

• In Event: Afterlives: Trash as a Form of Memory

Abstract

The Soviet Bloc was, among other things, a zone of strictly managed hierarchies of culture, wherein national and global canons codified and perpetuated clear divisions between what is "great" and eternal, on the one hand, and what is "garbage" and disposable, on the other, a construct that postcommunist writers in the region are frequently noted to have rebelled against. This paper revises the conventional interpretation of these authors' having rejected or subverted received canons by reevaluating the very notion of disposable culture. Drawing on examples from landmark texts in Russian and Polish, I suggest that these authors collectively project an idea of culture consisting not in hierarchies that can be accepted or inverted, but in a surfeit of available material--phrases, images, ideas--that is constantly recycled, remixed, and reengineered. For these writers, nothing is ever lost or wasted.

Author

• Benjamin Paloff, U of Michigan