A War Vocabulary: Traumatic Experience and the Search for a New Language in Ukrainian Literature

CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

The literature of the war against Ukraine testified to the profound changes that took place in the nature of Ukrainian artistic expression: from the loss of the very ability to speak, through the development of a new poetics of the voice and body, through literalism as the restoration of the connection between the word and reality and the rejection of metaphor in favor of metonymy – to the formation of a new idea of literature. Understood as a sphere of imagination and at the same time as a mechanism of representation, Ukrainian literature has been re-thinking its attitudes around reality and also its use for constructing of the ‘common places’ of anthropological and emotional experience. - Olena Haleta is a professor of literary theory and comparative literature at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv and professor of cultural anthropology at Ukrainian Catholic University (Ukraine). She is an author, co-author, and co-editor of eight books on the literary history of modern Ukraine.