Post-Chernobyl Library. Ukrainian Literary Postmodernism

“The Post-Chernobyl Library” by Professor Tamara Gundorova is one of the central texts of Ukrainian literary studies of the last few decades.

In the work, the genre of which the author herself defines as an exploration with commentary from the “end of postmodernism,” the literature of Ukrainian postmodernism is conceptualized as a space of linguistic, bodily, psychological, and geocultural transformations carried out in a playful manner, and its metaphor is the “post-Chernobyl library” — a set of texts, topographies, quotes, discourses, plots, names, and canons deployed at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The author interprets the post-Chernobyl text of Ukrainian postmodernism as carnivalized and post-apocalyptic, and Chernobyl — as a word-symbol denoting a state of presence after trauma. The original concept of postmodernism in the study is based on the methodology of nuclear criticism, because for postmodernist philosophy itself, postmodern is unambiguously associated with the nuclear age. Ultimately, by choosing the situation of the “end of postmodernism” as the lens, the author gets the opportunity to develop, and partly correct, her own vision of postmodernism in Ukrainian literature.

The publication is being implemented in cooperation with the Institute of Criticism and the journal “Krytika”.