Having exploded on the margins of Europe, Chornobyl marked the end of the Soviet Union and tied the era of postmodernism in Western Europe with nuclear consciousness. The Post-Chornobyl Library in Tamara Hundorova's book becomes a metaphor of a new Ukrainian literature of the 1990s, which emerges out of the Chornobyl nuclear trauma of the 26th of April, 1986. Ukrainian postmodernism turns into a writing of trauma and reflects the collisions of the post-Soviet time as well as the processes of decolonization of the national culture. A carnivalization of the apocalypse is the main paradigm of the post-Chornobyl text, which appeals to "homelessness" and the repetition of "the end of histories." Ironic language game, polymorphism of characters, taboo breaking, and filling in the gaps of national culture testify to the fact that the Ukrainians were liberating themselves from the totalitarian past and entering the society of the spectacle. Along this way, the post-Chornobyl character turns into an ironist, meets with the Other, experiences a split of his or her self, and witnesses a shift of geo-cultural landscapes.

About the Author

Tamara Hundorova is Chair of the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Associate of Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She is the author of Transit Culture: Symptoms of Postcolonial Trauma (2013), Kitsch and Literature: Travesties (2008), The Emerging Word: The Discourse of Early Ukrainian Modernism (1997, 2013), Femina melancholica: Sex and Culture in the Gender Utopia of Olha Kobylianska (2002). She taught at Toronto University, Harvard Summer School, Greifswald Ukrainicum, Ukrainian Free University. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, a Petro Jacyk Distinguished Fellowship (Harvard University), a visiting professorship at the SURC (Hokkaido University) and a fellowship at Monash University (Australia).

Dr. Sergiy Yakovenko teaches in the Department of English at MacEwan University. He is the author of Romantics, Aesthetes, Nietzscheans: Ukrainian and Polish Literary Criticism of the Early Modernist Period (2006) and Poetics and Anthropology: Essays on Ukrainian and Polish Prose on the 20th Century (2007), both books in Ukrainian.

Reviews

"[A]n exciting addition to the growing field of anglophone studies of Ukrainian literature. Hundorova masterfully traces the etiologies and manifestations of postmodern literary and cultural structures in Ukraine, placing the explosion of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant as the genesis of the postmodern cultural and literary movement in Ukraine. ... Ultimately, Hundorova's The Post-Chornobyl Library is an important contribution not only to the field of Ukrainian literary criticism but also to the expansive library of studies of postmodernism. This work will certainly prove useful to people in either field of study, and its new translation into English allows anglophone critics access to Hundorova's comprehensive, insightful, and theoretically sophisticated arguments on Ukrainian literature, postmodernism, and their interaction."

-Brett Donohoe, Harvard University, H-Ukraine

"Its depth of analysis and breadth of engagement with theorists and practitioners of postmodernism worldwide make this book essential reading for anyone studying the tectonic literary and cultural shifts that took place in Eastern Europe with the collapse of the Soviet state. ... Always insightful and often provocative, the essays of The Post-Chornobyl Library represent, in this reviewer's estimation, literary and cultural criticism at its best. Now available to the Anglophone audiences in a highly readable translation by Sergiy Yakovenko, they will be of great value to students and scholars of Ukrainian literature and culture, of postmodernism, and of Eastern Europe as a region."

-Oleksandra Wallo, University of Kansas, Russian Review

"In her writing, Hundorova demonstrates that she is extremely well read in literary criticism in general and on postmodernism in particular, citing numerous significant thinkers...The book in general will be useful both to literary theoreticians and thinkers as well as to students and a general literary audience interested in pre- and post- independence developments in Ukrainian literature."

- Aleksandra Konarzewska, Slavic Review

Book Information
ISBN 9781644692387
Author Tamara Hundorova
Format Paperback
Page Count 338
Imprint Academic Studies Press
Publisher Academic Studies Press