Cultural Hybridity

Historically shaped by shifting borders and mixing of various cultures and languages, identities in-between have been in abundance in the Russian empire and Central-Eastern Europe. This course offers a comprehensive study of the oeuvre of several major authors of modernity: the Ukrainian-Russian Nikolai Gogol and Vasyl Narizhnyi, the Czech-German-Jewish Franz Kafka, the Austrian-Galician-Jewish Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), the Ukrainian-Galician Olha Kobylyans'ka and Ivan Franko, the Russian-German Lou Andreas-Salome, the Jewish-Polish-Galician Bruno Schulz, the Ukrainian-Rusyn Yeva Biss, the Jewish-Yugoslav Danilo Kis, and several exhilic poets of the 1960s-1970s (Joseph Brodsky, Czes'aw Mi'osz, Tomas Venclova). Performing their identity in two or more cultures, these writers produced hybrid texts with which they intervened into the major culture as others. In the course, we will apply post-structuralist and post-colonial concepts such as minor language, heterotopia, in-betweenness, mimicry, indeterminacy, exile, displacement, and transnationalism to the study of the writers' oeuvres. We will also master the sociolinguistic analysis of such multi-lingual phenomena as self-translation, code-switching, and calquing and examine various versions of the same text to uncover the palimpsest of hybrid identities.