What place for the Black Sea in the construction of trauma?

Main Article Content

Atinati Mamatsashvili

Abstract

In Between Past and Future, Arendt, focusing on the crisis of education in US, observes that a “crisis forces us back to the questions themselves and requires from us either new or old answers”, and certainly not respond with ready – made ideas  – with « preformed judgments », with « prejudices » (Arendt 1961: 174). How do the literatures that face the historical, aesthetic crisis react to the latter, especially when it concerns minor or minority literatures? If minor literature "is not that of a minor language", but "rather that which a minority makes in a major language" (Deleuze & Guattari), the term could not be applied to Georgian literature. Would it be better to speak of “small literature”? These issues will be addressed together with those posed by literature in the face of history, when its own survival is called into question. Our proposal is to examine Georgian literary works composed in exile in France in the years 1920 – 1950, in parallel with those written under the Soviet regime. Coming from the world upheavals, in contact with the major literatures, how do these texts understand the trauma and the traumatic experience (Toros 2021; Merridale 2000) that they are subject to and what place for the Black Sea (real and/or imaginary space)? 

Published: Nov 14, 2022

Article Details

Section
How Can Literature Change the Geography? European Globality and the Black Sea/Ge