Resistant Postmodernisms: Writing Postcommunism in Armenia and Russia

Many postcolonial scholars have questioned the ethics of postmodern cultural production. Critics have labeled postmodernism a conceptual dead end - a disempowering aesthetic that does not offer a theory of agency in response to the workings of empire. This dissertation enters the conversation about the political alignment of postmodernism through a comparative study of postcommunist writing in Armenia and Russia, where the debates about the implications and usefulness of postmodernism have been equally charged. This project introduces the directions in which postcommunist postmodernisms developed in Armenia and Russia - in locally unique ways that reflected both the problems of the Soviet past and the post-Soviet present. It then moves on to an analysis of the work of five playwrights and novelists: Aghasi Ayvazyan, Perch Zeytuntsyan, Gurgen Khanjyan, Victor Pelevin, and Vladimir Sorokin. In reading the plays and novels of these authors, this study identifies several formal and stylistic connections between the post-Soviet renditions of the theater of the absurd and postmodernism: a resistance to interpretation accomplished by indeterminacy; a desire to push beyond the limits of logic; an emphasis on signs and symbols as opposed to their referents; and a rejection of well-made generic forms through the incorporation of intertextuality and textual play. On the thematic level, these plays and novels employ madness and confinement as metaphors for the problems of postcommunist nation building and politics. Through these images, the seemingly random, absurd texts of postcommunist postmodern culture unrelentingly interrogate the state apparatuses of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia; they insist upon a confrontation with Soviet history as a means by which to recognize the Soviet Union and, in the post-Soviet era, Russia as empire. Through the suggestion that the post-Soviet period entails a process of post-Sovietization rather than a radical break from the Soviet period, these texts challenge past and present power structures in the newly emerged post-Soviet nations. Taken together, the contemporaneous works of Armenian and Russian authors of the post-Soviet period offer a productive site for understanding resistant postmodernisms - that is to say, the politically subversive dimensions of postmodern literature and its critical power

The Languages of Berkeley: An Online Exhibition

The Languages of Berkeley: An Online Exhibition celebrates the magnificent diversity of languages that advance research, teaching, and learning at the University of California, Berkeley. It is the point of embarkation for an exciting sequential exhibit that built on one post per week, showcasing an array of digitized works in the original language chosen by those who work with these languages on a daily basis. Many of these early-published works are now in the public domain and are open to the world to read and share without restriction. Preparations for the online exhibition began in early 2018 with the final installment published online in October 2020. Using the Library’s instance of WordPress, the library exhibit comprises short essays of nearly all of the 59 modern and ancient languages that are currently taught across 14 departments on campus plus a dozen more languages that contributors wished to include. From September 2019 to August 2020, exhibit designer Aisha Hamilton and curator Claude Potts also installed a physical companion exhibition in Moffitt Library’s Free Speech Movement Café (FSM) centering on endangered languages which was cut short by the campus closure due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Photos from that installation are archived in this catalog with the open book publishing platform Pressbooks, along with the complete entries from the online exhibition. Aside from core support from the Library and the Berkeley Language Center, this multi-year project would not have been possible without the contributions and hard work of more than 45 librarians, professors, lecturers, staff, and students.&nbsp