Beyond the Novel: Satire in Eastern Europe and Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Mondegreen (2019)
The essay looks into the possibilities of conceptualizing literary cultures of Eastern Europe as a world-literary region in its own right. This region, formerly part of the so-called “Second World,” has virtually disappeared from the comparative literary scene after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. At the same time, the end of the Cold War coincided with the renewal of the debates about “world literature,” where the old opposition between “West” and “East” has been redrawn along the lines of “North” and “South.” This article focuses on a particular case in-between – Eastern Europe – as it takes on the double issue of “internal Orientalism” within Europe and the homogenizing effects of the privileged status of the novel in world-literary theory today. I draw on contemporary Ukrainian fiction to critique what I term a homogeneric vision of the contemporary world-literary field.
Thomas the Baboon and Utopia: Constructing a Realistic Future
This article reissues a call for the recuperation of a particular, non-substantive, approach to the category of Utopia in the current cultural debates about the future. I examine the usefulness of Utopia as a future-making category via a discussion of how Utopian desire manifests itself in the narrative structure of the literary text and what kind of formal and political consequences this manifestation implies. My case study, a prominent example of Ukrainian post-2014 fiction, Ivan Semesiuk’s satire Farshrutka (2016) presents a critical-satirical Utopian reaction to the realities and futural repercussions of the Russian-Ukrainian war, formalized in a literary form.
Narrating the Future: A World-Literary Take on the Crisis of Imagination and the Novel
This article, written in 2020, has started it all; it also has a stronger combination of my current research interest in world-literary theory with my background in narratology. My goal here was to intervene in the debates about the possibility of imagining and narrating utopian projects and alternative futures. Very often these debates culminate in the diagnosis that the future is too complex to be adequately represented in narrative form and that the imagination more generally is in crisis. To move beyond what increasingly seems like an impasse in this theoretical discourse, I suggested to shift the focus of the conversation from the core regions of the world-literary field to those of the semi-periphery — a move that illuminates the heterogeneity of futural visions in contemporary fiction. Reframing the problem of the future as that of collective action rather than of complexity, this article proposes that the perceived failure of narrative imagination is, in fact, an expression of the generic limits of the novel, limits that are particularly visible on the world-literary semi-periphery. To illustrate these points, there’s an analysis of Taras Antypovych’s Khronos (2011) and a discussion of how the pervasive concern with the future structurally manifests itself in the contemporary Ukrainian novel as a lack of transformative collective agency.