The project’s literary group continues its series of video essays, designed to make academic research accessible to a wider audience and to bring the conversations about the text, figures and phenomena beyond the academic community.
Rostyslav Semkiv’s video essay is dedicated to Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel «Everything is illuminated» - one of the most compelling works of American literature at the turn of 20th and 21st centuries. At the heart of the novel is a journey through Ukraine in the late 1990s in search of traces of a family destroyed during the Holocaust. A significant part of the book consists of the history of a Jewish town in Ukraine from the 18th century until its destruction during World War II, as well as peculiar American perspective on the Ukrainian reality of the late 1990s.
Foer’s novel is a striking example of metamodern writing, combining irony and grotesque with a desire for a serious conversation about memory and trauma. In a vide essay, Rostyslav Semkiv explains why this particular way of talking about the past is especially relevant to contemporary Ukrainian culture.
Find out more in the video essay on the YouTube channel via the link.
The video essay was created within the framework of the project «Jewish Heritage in Ukraine: interdisciplinary reflections through the lens of archival documents, culture, history and literature», implemented by the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy with the support of UNESCO and the European Union.
All publications within the project are produced with the financial support of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the partner and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.