Opening on the premise of the anachronism and atemporality of its subjects, Eastern Europe and literature, Anita Starosta's Form and Instability: Eastern Europe, Literature, Postimperial Difference sets the two into collision. Starosta writes: “[T]his book has a twofold commitment: to Eastern Europe on the one hand and to literature on the other” (4). To the degree that there is a discernible methodological difference between the book's sections, it might be divided into the theoretical frame and then unexpected close readings of mostly modernist Polish literature. “Part One: Frames of Intelligibility” seems primarily concerned with the post–Berlin Wall moment and the post-Soviet (re)construction of Eastern Europe; “Part Two: Conditions of Legibility” explores texts that are always, according to the central thesis, one step ahead of limiting interpretation. The hybrid study that results is startling, reads at times as a parable on the difficulty of publishing on “minor” literatures, provokes more questions...
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Book Review|
August 01 2017
Specters of Eastern Europe
Starosta, Anita,
Form and Instability: Eastern Europe, Literature, Postimperial Difference
(Evanston
: Northwestern UP
, 2016
), pp. 232, paper, $34.95.
Marijeta Bozovic
Marijeta Bozovic
Yale University
marijeta bozovic is assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures; film and media studies; and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University. She is the author of Nabokov's Canon: From Onegin to Ada (2016), and coeditor (with Matthew Miller) of Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River (2016) and (with Brian Boyd) of Nabokov Upside Down (2017).
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Novel (2017) 50 (2): 299–302.
Citation
Marijeta Bozovic; Specters of Eastern Europe. Novel 1 August 2017; 50 (2): 299–302. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-4150400
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