The Materiality of Memory: Everyday Objects in Post-Socialist Literatures and Cultures

This dissertation argues that material objects—narrated and exhibited—play a crucial role in acts that question and maintain historical divisions. This project showcases numerous adaptations and obfuscations of material objects for coming to terms with divisions, ruptures, and changes after 1989 in three former socialist countries—the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The main argument is that the palpability of material remains is used in life narratives—broadly conceived to incorporate museum guestbook entries and literary works—to demand diversification of state narratives and to reveal the need for positive social changes in the present. Through engagement with everyday “normal” life—where each chapter focuses on a different word from this collocation—this dissertation reveals that overdetermined readings of materiality limit critical understanding of the socialist past. Instead of proposing a uniformly symbolic reading of material objects, this project follows the cues of the life narratives that often emphasize the objects’ mundaneness. In so doing, this dissertation revisits dominant scholarly approaches to memory and nostalgia after socialism and proposes their reinterpretation to reflect on the multiplicity of post-socialist experiences. The project ultimately offers nuanced readings of the post-socialist everyday that incorporate ordinary people’s interpretations of everyday objects and examines the potential of the everyday for cultivating a nuanced understanding of the past and the present.

Department dc:contributor.department

Comparative Literature

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Ivanov, Sanja

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Lahusen, Thomas

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1807/150336

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/150336