After Memory. Rethinking Representations of World War II in Contemporary Eastern European Literatures

Convention Panel at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies in Chicago (09–12 Nov 2017). The convention theme 2017 is »Transgressions«.

Presentations:

• Nina Weller (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München): Rethinking the Concept of »Postmemory« in Regard to the Eastern European (Russian/Polish) Case
  
• Dana Mihailescu (University of Bucharest): The Thrusts of Ghost-Writing. Eastern European Survivors’ Memories of the Holocaust in Post-Cold War Western Societies
  
• Stephenie Young (Salem State University): Bodies of evidence. Memory, Revision and post-Yugoslav »Documentary« Literature
  

The panel enquires into the fundamental shifts in the literary representations of World War II which have taken place in East-European literatures in the last decades. The breakdown of state socialism in its specific instantiations and the vanishing of the generation of witnesses are causing massive changes in modes of remembrance. In Eastern Europe today, cultural memory is both post-socialist and post-memorial. The panel takes these observations as a starting point to discuss literature’s changing role in shaping the memory of World War II in a theoretical and comparative perspective.