Comparative Literature

The course will examine a number of works of literary writing situated at the intersection of reportage and testimony. The primary focus will be on some works by Svetlana Alexievich—"The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II" (1985), "Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War" (1991), "Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future" (1997), and "Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets" (2013)—whose themes, forms, and poetics will be explored. The course will then turn to two further texts that portray Russia in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century through forms that combine literary writing and reportage, viewed from geopolitical and human-rights perspectives: "An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World" (1992) by William T. Vollmann and "Un endroit inconvénient" (2023) by Jonathan Littell and Antoine D'Agata. Drawing on these readings, the course will finally seek to define the concept of non-fiction narrative and to examine some of the more specific implications arising from the interaction between literary writing and the practices of reportage and testimony.