| FT-53500-05 | Research Programs: Summer Stipends | Edith W. Clowes | The Center at the Periphery: Eccentric Identity in Contemporary Russian Writing | 5/1/2005 - 7/31/2005 | $5,000.00 | Edith | W. | Clowes | | | | University of Virginia | Lawrence | KS | 66045-7505 | USA | 2005 | Slavic Literature | Summer Stipends | Research Programs | 5000 | 0 | 5000 | 0 |
This five-chapter book project addresses symbolic geographies and identity in contemporary Russian writing culture. It examines the process of cultural regeneration in post-Soviet Russia and emerging articulations of identity that move beyond the traumas of the post-Soviet movement. I have found a pattern of movement away from the old center of Soviet ideology in Moscow to "peripheral" symbolic-geographical spaces that free the writer to prove alternate writing forms and articulations of identity. In Summer 2005 I will focus on the novel, "Chapaev and Emptiness" ("Chapaev i pustota," 1996), by Viktor Pelevin, his quarrel with globalization, and his interest in Buddhism and East Asia as an alternate geographical locus of the mind. |