Centrum Badań Literatury dla Dzieci i Młodzieży na Wydziale Filologicznym Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, Pracownia Literatury Dziecięcej i Młodzieżowej w Instytucie Filologii Angielskiej oraz Polska-Amerykańska Komisja Fulbrighta zapraszają na kolejny wykład z cyklu „International Voices in Children’s Literature Studies”.
Wykład pt. Bloodlands Fiction wygłosi w języku angielskim prof. Anastasia Ulanowicz z University of Florida.
Wykład odbędzie się 8 grudnia 2021 r. o godz. 18.00 za pośrednictwem platformy MS Teams. Wszystkich zainteresowanych udziałem w wykładzie prosimy o kontakt z dr. Mateuszem Świetlickim pod adresem mateusz.swietlicki@uwr.edu.pl.
Streszczenie w języku angielskim:
Although most North Americans are familiar with the Holocaust and the history of the Second World War in Western Europe, comparatively few are acquainted with the devastating consequences of these and other traumatic events in Eastern Europe. In the past two decades, however, North American children’s authors have made a concerted effort to introduce young people to the history of what scholar Timothy Snyder has called Europe’s “Bloodlands.” These authors – many of whom are children and grandchildren of Eastern European immigrants and refugees – have used such forms as novels, biography, and picture books to depict such topics as the Holodomor, the Stalinist purges, the Nazi siege of Leningrad, and the deportation of Jews, political objectors, and others westward to Nazi concentration camps and eastward to the Caucuses and Siberia.
In this lecture, then, I will introduce a developing genre of children’s literature that literary scholar Marek Oziewicz has called “Bloodlands Fiction.” Drawing on readings of such texts as Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s picture book Enough, Eugene Yelchin’s illustrated novel Breaking Stalin’s Nose, and M.T. Anderson’s biography, Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad, I will first identify the tropes and common concerns that define this genre. As I do so, I will attend to how authors’ cultural and generational proximity to the events they depict significantly affects the stories they tell. Ultimately, I will argue that works of Bloodlands Fiction have the potential to unsettle North Americans’ received knowledge of Second World War-era history, not least because they call attention to the shifting borders and historical complexities of a culturally- and ethnically-diverse region of Europe.
Notka bio w języku angielskim:
Anastasia Ulanowicz is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Florida, where she also serves as the Director of Graduate Student Teaching. Dr. Ulanowicz’s research is primarily focused on the representation of intergenerational relationships and memory in children’s literature and graphic narratives. Her current projects address the representation of Eastern Europe in Western children’s literature and comics. Currently, she is the associate editor of ImageText as well as the book reviews co-editor of The Lion and the Unicorn.