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Contemporary Ukraine on the Cultural Map of Europe
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Comments/Reviews
Description: The concept of a "return to Europe" has been integral to the movement for Ukrainian national rebirth since the nineteenth century. While the goal of a more fully reformed politics remains elusive, numerous expressions of Ukrainian culture continue to develop in the European spirit.
This wide-ranging book explores Ukraine's European cultural connection, especially as it has been reestablished since the country achieved independence in 1991. The contributors discuss many aspects of Ukraine's contemporary culture--history, politics, and religion in Part I; literary culture in Part II; and language, popular culture, and the arts in Part III.
What emerges is a fascinating picture of a young country grappling with its divided past and its colonial heritage, yet asserting its voice and preferences amid the diverse and at times conflicting realities of the contemporary political scene. Europe becomes a powerful point of reference, a measure against which the situation in post-independence Ukraine is gauged and debated. This framework allows for a better understanding of the complexities deeply ingrained in the social fabric of Ukrainian society.
Selected Contents:
Introduction: The Mapping of Ukraine
I. Mapping the Nation: History, Politics, and Religion
1. The Western Dimension of the Making of Modern Ukraine, Roman Szporluk
2. Cultural Faultlines and Political Cleavages, : The Legacy of History in Contemporary Ukraine Mykola Riabchuk
3. Ukraine's Road to Europe: A Still Controversial Issue, Giulia Lami
4. Finis Europae: Contemporary Ukraine's Conflicting Inheritances from the Humanistic "West" and the Byzantine "East" (A Triptych), Oxana Pachlovska
5. The Status of Religion in Ukraine and European Standards, Andrew Sorokowski
6. Missionaries and Pluralism: How the Law Changed the Religious Landscape in Ukraine, Catherine Wanner
7. The Future of Ukraine, If Values Determine the Course: What Opinion Polls Disclose About Public Attitudes on Political and Economic Issues, Elehie Skoczylas
8. Accountability for Human Rights Violations by Soviet and Other Communist Regimes and the Position of the Council of Europe Myroslava Antonovych
9. Collective Memory as a Device for Constructing a New Gender Myth, Marian Rubchak
II. Reflecting Identities: The Literary Paradigm
10. Mirrors, Windows, and Maps: The Topology of Cultural Identification in Contemporary Ukrainian Literature, Maria Zubrytska
11. Cultural Perceptions, Mirror Images, and Western Identification in New Ukrainian Drama, Larissa M.L. Zaleska Onyshkevych
12. Ukrainian Avant-Garde Poetry Today: Bu-Ba-Bu and Others, Michael M. Naydan
13. Nativists vs. Westernizers : Problems of Cultural Identity in Ukrainian Literature of the 1990s, Ola Hnatiuk
14. Back to the Golden Age: The Discourse of Nostalgia in Galicia in the 1990s, Lydia Stefanowska
15. Symbols of Transformation: The Reflection of Ukraine's "Identity Shift" in Four Ukrainian Novels of the 1990s Marko R. Stech
16. Choosing a Europe: Andrukhovych, Izdryk, and the New Ukrainian Literature, Marko Pavlyshyn
17. Images of Bonding and Social Decay in Contemporary Ukrainian Prose: Reading Serhii Zhadan and Anatolii Dnistrovyi, Maxim Tarnawsky
18. Women's Literary Discourse and National Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine, Maria G. Rewakowicz
III. Manifesting Culture: Language, Media, and the Arts
19. The European Dimension Within the Current Controversy over the Ukrainian Language Standard, Serhii Vakulenko
20. Colonial Linguistic Reflexes in a Post-Soviet Setting: The Galician Variant of the Ukrainian Language and Anti-Ukrainian Discourse in Contemporary Internet Sources Michael Moser
21. Criticism and Confidence: Reshaping of the Linguistic Marketplace in Post-Soviet Ukraine, Laada Bilaniuk
22. Linguistic Strategies of Imperial Appropriation: Why Ukraine Is Absent from World Film History, Yuri Shevchuk
23. Ukraine's Changing Communicative Space: Destination Europe or the Soviet Past?, Marta Dyczok
24. Envisioning Europe: Ruslana's Rhetoric of Identity, Marko Pavlyshyn
25. Contemporary Ukrainian Art and the Twentieth Century Avant-Garde, Myroslav Shkandrij
26. "The Past Is My Beginning. . .": On the Future of Music in Ukraine Virko Baley
About the Authors
Index
Review(s): Despite (or because of) Ukraine's complex cultural ties with Europe, little as been published on the subject. In that regard alone, this is a welcome contribution to the body of knowledge. However, the value of the contribution is immeasurably increased by the insightful treatment of the subject matter. Unusually, the quality of the work is consistently maintained across its 500 pages and 26 chapters divided into three sections. ... With so many penetrating contributions on Ukraine's cultural ties with Europe the book is a veritable tour de force on the subject. Importantly, the contributors retain a healthy balance between their normative position and scholarly analysis. Europe-Asia Studies
Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. Choice
    
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