Upcoming course taught by Humanities Fellow
Jessie Labov.
Underground Literatures and Unofficial Cultures
Winter 2007
TTh 2:15-3:30, 50-51P
This course will examine the concept of underground literature, beginning with its most notorious example from the Cold War era: samizdat literature
published underground in Eastern Europe, and the associated tamizdat literature, which was published in the West and smuggled across the Iron Curtain. From here, we will broaden the concept in several ways:
• what were the other forms of cultural expression that were also important to underground or unofficial cultures in Soviet-era Eastern Europe (radio, film, graphic art)?
• what were the historical pre-cursors to samizdat literature in nineteenth-century Europe and in other parts of the world (e.g., political underground literature of France in the Ancien Regime; Benjamin publishing tamizdat from outside of Germany in 1936)?
• what role does underground or unofficial culture play in non-authoritarian societies, when there is minimal government censorship and greater access to information (independent publishing and ’zine cultures in the U.S., 1960s to the present)
• how have new media such as satellite radio, desktop publishing, and other forms of webcasting been used to foster unofficial culture in repressive societies post-89 (websites in China and Tajikistan; Radio B92 in Belgrade)?
By expanding the concept of samizdat and tamizdat
to include these other media and historical/geographical/political contexts, this course will reach for a more theoretical understanding of what it means to produce texts under conditions of censorship, and how such a text can gain new meanings in crossing borders (both open and closed). What is the voice of the émigré when writing from outside of a closed society? How do certain subcultures in open societies construct their own “underground” in which to create unofficial culture? Student projects will address these issues through creative writing/production as well as critical analysis.
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