Eneken Laanes, Tallinn | Broken Lineages, Impossible Affiliations: Russian Baltic Subject in Andrei Ivanov’s Fiction
Fr 14.09.2018 | 11:30 Uhr | Rathaus Rostock
Broken Lineages, Impossible Affiliations: Russian Baltic Subject in Andrei Ivanov’s Fiction
The fiction by the Russian Estonian author Andrei Ivanov, well-received and much-awarded in Estonia, in Russia and elsewhere has called into question the linguistically drawn borders of literary fields and of national literatures in the Baltic Sea region. His protagonists are often (inner) exiles who refuse to belong to any of the existing linguistic, cultural or national communities in the region. The paper focuses on the metaphors of abortion and stillborn children in Ivanov's fiction and draws on Edward Said's ideas about exile and secular criticism to read these metaphors as tropes of the crisis of natural filiation and of broken lineage. With the help of these tropes Ivanov represents (inner) exile as a minority position that enables the critique of the filiative nature of cultural and national communities and invites a reflection on the possibilities of human existence beyond them.
Eneken Laanes
- Born in Äksi, Estonia in 1972
- PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Tartu, 2009
- Visiting scholar at the University of Bologna, the Free University of Berlin and a Juris Padegs Research Fellow at Yale University
- Senior Researcher at Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis at Tallinn University
- Unresolved Dialogues: Subjectivity and Memory in Post-Soviet Estonian Novel (in Estonian), 2009; Co-Ed., Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia, 2015
Contact: elaanes (at) tlu.ee
Web: https://www.etis.ee/CV/Eneken_Laanes/est?lang=ENG&tabId=CV_ENG
Foto: privat
