Voices of Resilience: Exploring Agency in Contemporary Slavic Poetry
The project "Voices of Resilience" examines agency and resilience in contemporary poetry from Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and Bosnia. The project is financed by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.
Voices of Resilience: Exploring Agency in Contemporary Slavic Poetry
The project “Voices of Resilience: Exploring Agency in Contemporary Slavic Poetry”, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, examines the construction of agency in contemporary Slavic poetry, particularly in the context of flight, displacement and war experiences.
Against the backdrop of the Russian invasion in 2022 and the beginning of the war back in 2014, the people of Ukraine have shown an unprecedented degree of agency and subjectivity. The project analyses how lyrical subjects articulate agency in poems and how poetic practices promote resilience under extreme conditions. Particular attention is paid to female or female-connoted poetic figures, as many of those displaced by war and violence are women whose writing, speaking and literary practices have an additional dimension of agency rooted in gender.
In addition, a comparative approach is taken to examine experiences of displacement in poetry from Belarus, Poland and Bosnia in order to gain a nuanced picture of agency and resilience in the context of Slavic literatures.
The project team consists of Slavicists Mariya Donska (project leader, post-doc), Julia Jahn (doctoral candidate) and Anna Gierlinger (student assistant).
