Tag Archives: Soviet Union

In the Cold War, was world literature English?

By | August 16, 2022

What is “Cold War literature”? Does the term merely refer to novels and poems and plays that explicitly touch on nuclear war, spying, and fear of Communism, works like Nevil Shute’s On The Beach or Eugene Lederer’s The Ugly American

Discover the forgotten works of East Europe’s “Second World”

By | July 29, 2021

book, Literature and Film from East Europe’s Forgotten “Second World,” was inspired by my years of teaching literature and film from East Europe of the socialist “Second World” era at the University of Washington in Seattle. Over time, I noticed an interesting paradox: the more this period—which ended with the 1989 fall of communism and the subsequent dissolution of countries like the USSR, Czechoslovakia and, of course, Yugoslavia—receded into a historical never-land, the more its stories, novels and films seemed to resonate with and delight my students.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogic

By | March 16, 2012

If you have studied Mikhail Bakhtin, then no doubt you will have felt as bewildered as the man himself looks here. Help is at hand in the form of our new book Key Terms in Literary Theory. All week we have been quoting definitions from the book and today we look at the term 'Dialogic'.… Read More »