Anita Starosta
Pennsylvania State University, English, Department Member
- Pennsylvania State University, Global and International Studies, Department Memberadd
- World Literature, Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, Feminist Theory, Literary Theory, Humanities, and 80 moreAnthropology of Eastern Europe, Post-Communism, Eastern Europe, Post-Soviet Regimes, Postsocialism, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Aesthetics, Cultural Theory, Visual Studies, Walter Benjamin, Conrad, Joseph, Jacques Rancière, Human Trafficking, Derek Walcott, Gayatri Spivak, Poststructuralism, Frankfurt School (Philosophy), Contemporary Literature, Eastern European Studies, Translation theory, European integration, Epistemology, Anglophone Literature, Human Rights, Literature of the Anglophone Caribbean, English Literature, Deconstruction, Postcolonial Theory, Post-Socialism, Postcolonial Studies, Gender Studies, Political Philosophy, Human Rights Theory, Latin American literature, Twentieth Century Literature, Critical Theory, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, English, Bruno Schulz, Dialect Literature, Narratives of Collapse, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Cultural Studies, Post-Soviet Literature and Film, Critical Race Theory, Allegory, Robert Musil, W.G. Sebald (Area Studies), Arundhati Roy, Paul de Man, Zbigniew Herbert, Imre Kertesz, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Elfriede Jelinek, Józef Tischner, Franz Kafka, Orhan Pamuk, Witold Gombrowicz, Salman Rushdie, Name Studies, Aesthetic Experience, Bakhtin, Utterance, Heteroglossia, Dialogism, Polyphony, The Other, Nineteenth and Twentieth century Literature, German Women's Writing, Gender In German Literature, Contemporary German Writing From Central and Eastern Europe, Herta Müller, Frankfurt School, Boaventura De Sousa Santos, Decolonial Thought, Global History, Michał Paweł Markowski, and Women's Studiesedit
- Ph.D. in History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz
B.A. in Literature, Cornell University (College Scholar)edit
Published in the FlashPoints Series of Northwestern University Press, Form and Instability brings notions of figuration and translation to bear on the post-1989 condition. “Eastern Europe” in this book is more than a territory. Marked by... more
Published in the FlashPoints Series of Northwestern University Press, Form and Instability brings notions of figuration and translation to bear on the post-1989 condition. “Eastern Europe” in this book is more than a territory. Marked by belatedness and untimely remainders, it is an unstable object that is continually misapprehended. From the intersection of comparative literature, area studies, and literary theory, Starosta considers the epistemological and aesthetic consequences of the disappearance of the Second World. Literature here becomes a critical lens in its own right—both object and method, it confronts us with the rhetorical dimension of language and undermines the ideological and hermeneutic coherence of established categories. In original readings of Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz, among other twentieth-century writers, Form and Instability unsettles cultural boundaries as we know them.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Eastern European Studies, European Studies, Translation Studies, and 21 moreEuropean integration, Interdisciplinarity, Postcolonial Studies, Deconstruction, Postsocialism, Global Studies, Literary Theory, Polish Literature, World Literature, Aesthetics and Politics, New Formalism, Comparative literature, Literary theory, Central and Eastern Europe, Joseph Conrad, Temporality, Józef Tischner, Witold Gombrowicz, Ryszard Kapuściński, Theory of Form and Aesthetics, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and Tadeusz Konwicki
from Kafka's The Building of the Temple: "Foreign workers brought the marble blocks, trimmed and fitted to one another... No building ever came into being as easily as did this temple... Except that, to wreak a spite or to desecrate or... more
from Kafka's The Building of the Temple: "Foreign workers brought the marble blocks, trimmed and fitted to one another... No building ever came into being as easily as did this temple... Except that, to wreak a spite or to desecrate or destroy it completely, instruments obviously of a magnificent sharpness had been used to scratch on every stone—from what quarry had they come?—for an eternity outlasting the temple, the clumsy scribblings of senseless children's hands, or rather the entities of barbaric mountain dwellers."
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The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our... more
The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English,
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Ukrainian poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and “patriarch of Bu-Ba-Bu” Yuri Andrukhovych shares his perspectives on contemporary European, Russian, and Ukrainian cultures and politics; and on the current situation of writers working... more
Ukrainian poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and “patriarch of Bu-Ba-Bu” Yuri Andrukhovych shares his perspectives on contemporary European, Russian, and Ukrainian cultures and politics; and on the current situation of writers working in minor languages in this part of the world. East-Central Europe, for him, is the ever-shifting terrain of struggle over and for Europeanness and, at the same time, a place where ruins are still uncertain and thus full of creative potentiality. Andrukhovych’s own influences, which include Franz Kafka, Magical Realism, and the Polish O’Harists—itself a movement influenced by the New York School—trace an uncommon path of world-literary circulation.
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“Perverse Tongues” articulates “postsocialism” as an analytical lens on the current global condition. The “post-socialist” here marks modes of personhood and locution that are perverse with respect to the reproductive aims of the... more
“Perverse Tongues” articulates “postsocialism” as an analytical lens on the current global condition. The “post-socialist” here marks modes of personhood and locution that are perverse with respect to the reproductive aims of the post-1989 order. Deriving from the socialist past but not reducible either to its official doctrines or to its official dissident cultures, these modes of personhood persist. And they disable, however momentarily, the apparently closed language of neoliberal freedom and progress. The essay turns to figurations of Eastern Europe’s contemporary predicament found in Michał Witkowski’s novel Lovetown (2004), which tracks an aging queer community for whom the transition to capitalism and liberal democracy brought not emancipation but the threat of catastrophe; and in Szabolcs Hajdu’s magical-realist film Bibliothèque Pascal (2010), which tells the story of a woman who returns from working in an elite brothel in the UK. What makes these texts apt reflections on the pernicious effects of the neoliberal order and indices of a more general global condition is not merely the social and economic marginality of these subjects. As they resist both the liberal dream of common humanity that might be achieved through recognition and the neoliberal dream of prosperity that is indifferent to the human as such, the novel and the film call for practices of reading and spectatorship that would be attentive to subjective and temporal fractures within the putatively unified global present.
Research Interests: Eastern European Studies, Translation Studies, Heterotopia, Gender and Sexuality, Postsocialism, and 12 moreGlobal Studies, Neoliberalism, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Postcommunist studies, Globalization and literature, Neoliberalisms and the Transformation of the Cultural Sphere, Central and Eastern Europe, Temporality, Mikhail Bakhtin, Cultural Globalization, Multilingual Studies, Identity Studies, Border identities, hybridity, multilingualism, poetry, bilingual poetry, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, globalization studies, third culture kids, and Neoliberalizm
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This article is a close reading of Józef Tischner's Historia filozofii po góralsku [History of Philosophy in Góral] (1997), considered alongside Barbara Cassin's Vocabulaire européen des philosophies [European Vocabulary of Philosophies]... more
This article is a close reading of Józef Tischner's Historia filozofii po góralsku [History of Philosophy in Góral] (1997), considered alongside Barbara Cassin's Vocabulaire européen des philosophies [European Vocabulary of Philosophies] (2004) and in the context of European unification. Written in the Góral dialect of Polish and recounting the history of philosophy as if it belonged to Górals, Tischner's book re-imagines Europe as a space of reciprocity, equality, and freedom. This gesture is inseparable from the mode of as if, a mode that translation, literature, reading, and the future anterior tense all hold in common.
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Between 1917 and 1920, Joseph Conrad composed about 20 prefaces, entitled Author's Notes, to his fictional works. Along with Notes on Life and Letters, a col-lection of non-fiction writings published in 1921, the... more
Between 1917 and 1920, Joseph Conrad composed about 20 prefaces, entitled Author's Notes, to his fictional works. Along with Notes on Life and Letters, a col-lection of non-fiction writings published in 1921, the Author's Notes have been seen as a testamentary act ...
A talk at boundary 2's 2018 conference in Pittsburgh
Invited talk on the links and divergences between Polish (ethics of) Solidarity and Latin American Liberation Theology.
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Presentation at the Arts of Bandung Humanism conference, UCLA