Heterotopic Dreams: Yuri Andrukhovych's Essayistic Project and Its Evolution

Heterotopic Dreams: Yuri Andrukhovych's Essayistic Project and Its Evolution
Date
Fri March 5th 2021, 12:00 - 1:30pm
Event Sponsor
CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
Location
Zoom
Speaker: Vitaly Chernetsky

Join us for a talk by Vitaly Chernetsky on the author Yurii Andrukhovych.

Over the past three decades, Yuri Andrukhovych came to be recognized as arguably the leading Ukrainian literary figure actively and consistently engaging with the broader east/Central European problematic in his work. Initially acclaimed as a poet, he has also been applying his poetic sensibilities to his prose fiction and especially to his lyrical essays. An exploration of the complex hybridizing cultural overlap and exchange is a leitmotif running through his work, from the earliest essays, like "Introduction to Geography" (1993) through later essay collections, the idiosyncratic book Lexicon of Intimate Cities (2011), consisting of 111 texts, each of them associated with a different city from all over the world, and subtitled "a free-form textbook in geopoetics and cosmopolitics," and his recent writings, like the novel in quasi-documentary short stories Darlings of Justice (2017). In this talk, Chernetsky will highlight and discuss key enduring concerns of Andrukhovych's essayism and their transformation over the years.

Vitaly Chernetsky is an Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Kansas University.A native of Odessa, Ukraine, Professor Chernetsky completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to coming to the University of Kansas, he taught at Columbia University and at Miami University in Ohio. His research interests include Russian and Ukrainian literature and culture (film, theatre, visual arts); cultural aspects of globalization; modernism, postmodernism; postcolonial theory, diasporic cultures; nationalism and ethnicity; feminist theory, gender and LGBT studies. He is a past president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (2009-2018) and the current Vice President and Scholarly Secretary of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the US. He authored the monograph Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (Montreal: McGill— Queen’s University Press, 2007) and several dozens of scholarly articles. He has also translated Yurii Andrukhovych’s novels Twelve Circles and Moskoviad

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Hosted by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES).