Slavic Documentary Poetry

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Bringing together case studies from Belarusian, Bosnian, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian traditions, this panel explores the evolving landscape of documentary poetry in Slavic literature and the diverse ways in which poets have engaged with trauma, violence, war, and historical erasure. What strategies have they used to bear witness, expose and/or preserve historical truth (whether objective or subjective), or set the official record straight? How does the documentary impulse manifest itself in poetic form, style, and tone? What truths can documentary poetry vouch for? And how can it become a site of moral reckoning? Finally, how can Michel Foucault’s notion of “regimes of truth” help us redefine the concept of documentary poetry to account for its internal contradictions and varying claims to truth? These are the questions the participants will explore.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 21st Century

Chair

• Jenya Mironava, Harvard U

Papers

• Alen Kristić and the Big Memory of Small Verse - Brett Donohoe, Amherst College

• Lists of Material Objects in Polish Holocaust Poems - Aleksandra Kremer, Harvard U

• Poetry of Radical Regimes of Truth: Toward a Redefinition of the Concept of Documentary Poetry - Ilya Kukulin, Stanford U

• Documenting Catastrophe: Trauma, Poetic Form, and the Documentary Impulse in Contemporary Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian Poetry - Mariia Malinovskaia, Stanford U

Discussant

• Catherine Ann Ciepiela, Amherst College