Crossroads of Culture: The Literatures of Ukraine from Crimea to the Shtetls (Affiliate) (SEES0142)

Only for affiliate students at UCL in Term 2 only.

This module will introduce you to the diverse and fascinating cultural history of Ukraine. You will study literary texts written in many of the languages spoken historically in Ukraine, including Ukrainian, German, Polish, Russian and Yiddish. More broadly, you will consider how literature functions in borderland settings, caught between national and imperial political projects, and how cultures that occupy the same geographical spaces mutually influence and compete with one another. You will use cultural theories related to nationalism and empire to study how cultures overlap and interact and how literature responds to the social and political specificity of a multicultural imperial periphery. You will gain a detailed knowledge of Ukrainian cultural history from the late 18th century to the present day; you will study the role that the territories of Ukraine played in the cultures of Russia and Poland; you will also consider literature written by Jewish authors in multiple languages on these territories and how these writers interacted with the literatures and cultures that surrounded them.

Historiography|Second-Third World encounter|Socialist world system|Global circulation of ideas

As decolonization accelerated in the years after the Second World War, dynamic new linkages opened up between the so-called “Second World” (from...

Between the &#039;Second&#039; and the &#039;Third&#039; Worlds: Socialist modernity and globalization, 1945-1991 (SEES0062)

As decolonization accelerated in the years after the Second World War, dynamic new linkages opened up between the so-called “Second World” (from the Soviet Union to the GDR) and the “Third World” (from Latin America to Africa to Asia). Nikita Khrushchev trumpeted the expansion of a “socialist world system,” and multi-lateral contacts proliferated through political connections, economic development and trade relationships, educational projects and cultural exchange, migration, and military training and intervention. This course explores the new historiography of the Second-Third World encounter, offering new insights into the global circulation of ideas during the Cold War and evaluating the fate of socialist modernity as an alternative globalization.