Exploring Cultural Memory: Collection, Construction, and Continuity in Modern Ukrainian Literature

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel delves deeper into the practices of collection, construction, and continuity, recognizing them as critical elements (significant factors) in the formation and preservation of cultural memory in Ukrainian tradition from the 1920s to the present day. It emphasizes how cultural memory, embodied through various personal practices, acquires collective significance. The panelists concentrate on the functioning of memory in challenging and turbulent contexts – totalitarian society, war, forced emigration, and postcolonial situations – which create distortions and ruptures, that require recollection and reassessment. Such contexts highlight the non-stable nature of memory and demonstrate how it can be altered, erased, or manipulated under oppressive conditions.
The panel explores the tension between forgetting and remembering, highlighting how silence, omissions, and memory gaps can influence the formation of collective memory. The presented papers show how cultural memory is reclaimed, reconstructed, and can bridge the ruptures in response to historical events, societal shifts, and personal experiences; how memory is transmitted across generations and shaped by both personal and collective challenges. They emphasize the importance of archival practices, literary translation, and narrative strategies in the preservation and transformation of cultural heritage.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Olena Haleta, Ivan Franko National U of Lviv (Ukraine)

Papers

• Cultural memory as a Concept and Collection: Taras Shevchenko in the Legacy of Yur Mezhenko - Olena Haleta, Ivan Franko National U of Lviv (Ukraine)

• Bridging Worlds: Anna-Halja Horbatsch's Literary Translation and the Construction of Ukrainian Cultural Memory - Mariia Ivanytska, Taras Shevchenko National U of Kyiv (Ukraine)

• Search for Self: Bridging the Broken Continuity of Ukrainian Cultural Memory in ‘Amadoka’ by S. Andrukhovych and ‘Forgottenness’ by T. Maliarchuk - Olena Saikovska, U of Tübingen (Germany)

Discussant

• Oksana Lutsyshyna, Independent Writer, Translator, and Poet

Session Manager

• Katherina Boicheva Kokinova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Bulgaria)