Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

SLA248H. Women and Women's Themes in Ukrainian Literature. Spring 2023

Term Papers

Term papers are due directly after the last day of class, April 4, 2023 but no later than midnight April 17, 2023. Papers are to be 5–6 pages, typed, double spaced, and in English. Papers are to be written on topics approved by the instructor. You can submit your essay on paper at the last class. Otherwise, please email your essay to maxim.tarnawsky@utoronto.ca

Suggestions for term paper topics

Students must develop their own topic and discuss it in advance with the instructor. Any topic that relates to women's themes in Ukrainian literature is appropriate.

You may wish to consider one or more of the following issues: women's rights as a social and political issue, the struggle for women's rights in conflict with the struggle for national liberation (or social justice, or personal happiness, or any other issue that can compete with "women's" issues), questions of women's identity (social, sexual, psychological), stereotypical images of women (by men and by women).

Keep in mind that this is a literature course and you are expected to offer a close reading of a literary text, that is, you are expected to show how you explore the ideas presented in the text. Since this is a course on women's themes, the ideas you explore must have a special relation to women and women's issues.

Your essay should be about a single work of literature, or a small selection of works. Under no circumstances should you be thinking of topics that appply to all of Ukrainian literature. That is at least a book-length topic. If your essay includes the words "Ukrainian literature" you are probably doing something wrong.

Here are some ideas to help you develop a topic:

• Hopelessness and fate as metaphors for the condition of women in society.
• Free, strong, and courageous women as a threat to male dominance in society.
• The enslavement of women as a special instance of national powerlessness.
• The luxury of powerlessness and the responsibility of power.
• Sexuality as power and authority.
• Marriage: the only identity a woman can have.
• Does a woman's freedom limit her happiness?
• The greatest impediment to a woman's self-realization is her sense of duty to others.

You may work with one or more of the texts we have read in class, or you may choose a different text or texts. There are five more volumes in the Women's Voices series with plenty of texts to choose from. Oksana Zabuzhko's Field Research in Ukrainian Sex exists in English, as does her Museum of Abandoned Secrets. You can choose any work of Ukrainian literature that deals with "women's themes." If you can read Ukrainian, you may work from an original Ukrainian text, even if there is no translation. Other authors you may consider: Ievhenia Kononeko, Iurii Vynnychuk, Valerii Shevchuk, Oles' Honchar, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Viktor Domontovych.