10/23/2023
Come hear Jenny Kaminer speak about "Adolescence as Nightmare in Contemporary Russian Culture"!
In the pantheon of Soviet heroes and heroines, teenagers like Pavlik Morozov, Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia, and the Ukrainian Komsomol Young Guard provided models of self-sacrifice, dedication to the collective, and bravery. This talk focuses on works of contemporary Russian culture in which post-Soviet teen protagonists inspire fear, horror, or disgust. They become the locus of an array of anxieties, ranging from the instability and vulnerability of the human body, the preeminence of materialistic values and consumer culture, to the disappearance of moral codes. Disparate literary, cultural and cinematic texts reconfigure what Nancy Lesko (Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence, 2001) called the “romance with adolescence”—an outsized belief in the potential of youth to ensure progress and the improvement of the human condition—into a distinctive vision of adolescence as nightmare.
Jenny Kaminer is Professor of Russian and Chair of the Department of German and Russian at UC Davis. She is the author of "Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture" (Northwestern UP, 2014), which received the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Gender Studies; and "Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence in Post-Soviet Culture" (Northern Illinois/Cornell University Press, 2022), which was recently awarded the 2023 Book Prize by the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. Her current research focuses on folk ritual and the female body in contemporary Russian film.
On Zoom, Oct 25, 2023, 3-4 pm Pacific time:
Invite Link https://washington.zoom.us/j/94830685166
