Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

SLA358H1S, Breaking Away from Empire:
Ukrainian Fiction Since Independence
Spring 2024

Class meets on Wednesdays 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM.

Final papers are due are due after the last class, April 2, 2024 and no later than Friday, April 11. Papers are to be 5–6 pages long. They are to be typed, double spaced, and in English. Papers may be written on any topic after consulting with the instructor. You can submit your essay on paper at the last class. Otherwise, please email your essay to maxim.tarnawsky@utoronto.ca

You are free to write on any topic that involves an analysis of literary works from Contemporary Ukraine. The best topics are always those you come up with yourself. What follows is sooner a list of ideas to stir your own imagination, rather than actual suggestions for a topic. In all cases you will want to select and narrow your focus so that your essay is constructed as a detailed analysis, a particular interpretation, rather than a general overview.

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. If you can read Ukrainian, you may work from an original Ukrainian text, even if there is no translation.

1. Explore and interpret any other work on our reading list by an author we have read, and compare it to the work we did read.
2. Choose two works, on or off the reading list, and compare how they handle a particular theme, idea, or situation.
3. How is the Soviet experience depicted in post-Soviet works?
4. What social, cultural, intellectual (choose one only!) problems do post Soviet works depict?
5. How are women, young people, intellectuals (choose only one!) depicted in post Soviet works?
6. What is the role of geography, religion, poverty (choose only one!) in post Soviet works?
7. What new stylistic features of writing do post Soviet writers (choose only one!) bring to their works?