Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women's Culture: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women's Culture

ISBN-13: 9781563241260 / Angielski / Miękka / 1993 / 320 str.

Helena Goscilo

Opis

The 1980s witnessed the ascendency of Russian women in multiple spheres of artistic creation, including literature, film, and painting. This volume may thus be said to engage not only women's artistic production but, indeed, the best and most colourful of recent Russian culture. Treating contemporary Russian women's creativity, it approaches women's texts, films, and canvasses from a range of perspectives, from anti-gendered to feminist. Some of the essays introduce writers not previously well studied, others challenge conventional interpretations and assumptions, while still others yield original viewpoints through novel juxtapositions. In addition to offering insights into the various artists under analysis, the essays map the wide terrain of issues and methodologies proliferating in cultural criticism today, and mirror the diversity that is one of the most appealing features of women's creativity in contemporary Russia.

Spis treści

Against the powerful image of Japan as a rising economic superpower, or even, in Ezra Vogel's influential formulation a deade ago, "Japan as number 1", this book explores the fragility, hubris and human and environmental costs of Japan's desperate drive for hyperdevelopment. As this economic superpower finds itself drifting, rudderless, through the decade, four seminal events seem to emblemise the enveloping crisis: the Kobe Earthquake, which the author shows to be no mere act of nature, but an event whose consequences are intimately bound up with desperate hypergrowth; the Ayum Rikyo poison gas attack, which struck at Japan's sense of security in its deepest senses (psychological and moral, as well as physical); the collapse of the LDP single-party rule after nearly 40 years, plunging Japan's superstable political system into crises manifested by implausible coalition with little more than a thirst to rule in common; and Japan's inability to come to terms with war respnsibility ever after 50 years, best symbolised by the Comfort Women issue and the government's hapless attempt to come up with an appropriate formula for recognising, apologising and making amends for wartime aggression and crimes. Gavan McCormack addresses these issues - which are political, economic, social cultural and moral in the most profound sense - directly in this book.

O autorze

Helena Goscilo, currently the Chairwoman of the Slavic Department at the University of Pittsburgh, specializes in Romanticism, contemporary Russian literature and culture, and Slavic women's writing. Her publications include articles on Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoi, Bulgakov, and Tolstaia, as well as Russian and Polish Women's Fiction (University of Tennessee Press, 1985); Balancing Acts (Indiana University Press, 1989; Dell, 1991); Glasnost: An Anthology of Literature (Ardis, 1990}---with Byron Lindsey; The Wild Beach and Other Stories (Ardis, 1992}---also with Lindsey; Skirted Issues: The Discreteness and Indiscretions of Russian Women's Prose (Russian Studies in Literature, Spring 1992); Lives in Transit (Ardis, 1993). She is working on three monographs, devoted respectively to recent women's fiction, Tat'iana Tolstaia, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia.