Literature in Transition: Meeting the “Monstrous Double"- lecture

The Hieronim Łopaciński Voivodeship Library of Lublin, International Centre for Research of the History and Cultural Heritage of the Central and Eastern European Jews, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin invite you to the lecture:

Literature in Transition: Meeting the “Monstrous Double”

to be delivered by Professor Roman Katsman, Department of Literature of the Jewish Peopl, Faculty of Jewish Studies, Bar-Ilan University, ISRAEL,

moderated by Professor Sławomir Jacek Żurek, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin,

which will take place on September 12, 2023 at 5:00 pm (Narutowicza 4 Street; 20-950 Lublin)

Migrant and nomadic literature poses, today as in any time of war, catastrophe and epochal shift, acute problems for historians, philologists, culturologists, and sociologists. Two fundamentally different cases can be distinguished here: immigration and repatriation. This difference manifests itself in many aspects, and particularly in the character of literature, the imagination, symbolism, and – perhaps the most important – the attitude towards the languages in which it is written. Amazing example of this presents the literature of Jewish authors – emigrants from the Soviet or post-Soviet regions, who repatriated to Israel. Most of them have continued to write in Russian, thus creating a unique literary area inside the Jewish and Israeli literature, which requires separate consideration and reflection. Among others, in this large group (thousands of authors, from 1920s to 2020s), there are also “transit” writers – those who, after living and writing for some time in the country of repatriation, leave for other countries. Such processes give rise to complex cultural and poetic phenomena in the literature. To better understand them, it is useful to turn to the philosophical-anthropological theory of “monstrous double” by Rene Girard and the “generative anthropology” by Eric Gans.