Hallucinating the Ukrainian Cityscape: A Reevaluation of Walter Benjamin’s Urban Experience for a Postsocialist Context
Abstract
This thesis project explores the correspondence between Walter Benjamin’s conception of modern urban experience and postsocialist representations of urban space in Ukrainian literature. By examining how urban experience influences the mobilization of formal strategies in literature and critical theory, this project articulates the normative assumptions about the interpenetration of social practice and political economy latent in Benjamin’s own writing and the scholarship of his works about the modern city. The project compares the theory and practice of shock, fragmentation, and allegory in Benjamin’s cultural criticism with Oksana Zabuzhko’s “Prypiat,” Yuri Andrukhovych’s Moscoviad, and Serhiy Zhadan’s Depeche Mode. The project performs a comparative literary analysis while incorporating scholarship on urban experience from the fields of art history, human geography, and sociocultural anthropology. This project challenges the assumption that the postsocialist fragmentation of collectivity and critique of modern historical metanarratives are incompatible with Benjamin’s concept of utopian desire. Rather, an analysis of Benjamin’s work and postsocialist literature illustrates how their embeddedness within particular socioeconomic and historical contexts affects their respective representations of the connection between subjective and universal historical experiences.