Writing Postcommunism : Towards a Literature of the East European Ruins

Moving through the elegiac ruins of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav disintegration, Writing Postcommunism explores literary evocations of the pervasive disappointment and mourning that have marked the postcommunist twilight. Moving through the elegiac ruins of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav disintegration, Writing Postcommunism explores literary evocations of the pervasive disappointment and mourning that have marked the postcommunist twilight. With particular reference to the writings of Croatian emigre Dubravka Ugresic, and those of Milan Kundera, Clemens Meyer, Ingo Schulze, Jachym Topol, Christa Wolf, and others, it is argued that a significant body of postcommunist literature is underpinned and scarred by the semantic field of ruins: melancholia and nostalgia, presence and absence, pride and shame, and not least, remembering and forgetting. Taken together, the writings considered suggest a post-1989 'literature of the ruins', an amorphous, anti-formative framework that also dramatically illuminates the post-1989 ruins of east European literature itself - what remains when, as Gyorgy Konrad put it, 'something is over' Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction: Exercises in Polysemy....Pages 1-32 ‘The Citizen of a Ruin’....Pages 33-69 Unconditional Surrender and the Ruins of Berlin....Pages 70-98 Aporias, Impasses and Ostalgia....Pages 99-126 Trümmerliteratur Redux....Pages 127-164 Epilogue: ‘The Future Has No Future’....Pages 165-175 Back Matter....Pages 176-231