Authors

Schamma Schahadat¹;  ¹ Eberhard Karls University Tuebingen, Germany

Discussion

The novel that intertwined environmental desasters and an existential angst was Don DeLillo's "White Noise" from 1985. In the Soviet Union and the states that resulted from its collapse (Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan) the opposite logic was at work: as long as you cannot see or feel it, everything is alright. The paper will look at literary texts dealing with environmental catastrophes in the (post)Soviet Space (Svetlana Aleksievich on Chornobyl, Abdishamil Nurpeissow on Lake Aral). How are narratives on catastrophies established in a certain cultural and social space? Who reacts to it and how? How do these narratives relate to classical literary texts like, e.g., to Heinrich von Kleist’s The earthquake of Chili? Are there intertextual lines or does each culture and time develop its own narrative of catastrophies? How do these narratives change in time?