The Other Europe: Literature from East Central Europe

Catalog description

East Central Europe, both despite and because of its history of shape-shifting borders, has long been the locus of extraordinarily diverse humanity. There are few other regions where so many ethnicities, languages, and religions exist side by side -- or even closer than that -- with one another. It is also a region carved and re-carved into subject pieces by empires: Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian before World War I, violently torn between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II, and forcibly coerced into a Bloc until the last decade of the 20th century. Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz asserted that "the most striking feature in Central European literature is its awareness of history": of history's somehow coexistent inexorability and caprice, and of its capacity for a full spectrum of absurdity, from tragic to banal to comic. This course will introduce works in translation by 20th- and 21st-century East Central European writers (Tokarczuk, Ugresic, Kassabova, Knezevic, and others) -- supplemented with selections from film, visual art, and music -- and consider how these creative works respond to the complexities of the region's history, cultural diversity, and individual and collective identities.