Gastvortrag von Larissa Rudova (Pomona College)

Institut für Slavische Philologie der LMU lädt ein zum Gastvortrag von

Larissa Rudova (Pomona College):
“Disrupting the Canon of Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Meet Mikita Franko”

WANN: Montag, 28. Oktober, 12-14 Uhr c.t.
WO: Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 (LMU-Hauptgebäude), Raum E 318

Der Vortrag findet im Rahmen der Literaturtheorie-Vorlesung von Svetlana Efimova (svetlana.efimova@lmu.de) statt.

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Abstract:

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, new themes have emerged in Russian children’s and young adult (YA) literature. Among them, gender has become a prominent, albeit controversial topic for readers, literary critics, and educators. Queer literature runs counter to the rapidly changing cultural and political climate of contemporary Russia, beginning with Putin’s 2013 adoption of the gay propaganda law, tightened in 2023, and because of the government's strong emphasis on protecting traditional family values. In this political atmosphere, the topic of queer children and adolescents has hardly been raised on public platforms and remains a blind spot in Russian literary criticism and scholarship.
This talk is an attempt to start a discussion about YA queer literature written by Russian authors in the last two decades of this century. Starting with Ludmila Ulitskaya’s book project Other, Others, Otherwise, whose main themes were diversity, tolerance and understanding of the “other,” characters with non-traditional sexual orientation slowly and cautiously began to appear in books for youngsters. But it wasn’t until 2018 that new publisher Popcorn Books began releasing YA books with LGBT+ content. One of its talented authors became Mikita Franko (b. 1997), a young Kazakhstani writer who, in his seven novels to date, narrates the lives of queer teenagers and queer adults. We will look at how Franko’s books explore sociocultural attitudes to gender and sexuality in Russia and scrutinize the institution of the traditional nuclear family as well as the notion of “family values.”

Dr. Larissa Rudova is Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and Professor of German and Russian at Pomona College. She is the author of two monographs, Pasternak’s Short Fiction and the Cultural Vanguard (1995) and Understanding Boris Pasternak (1997). She has co-edited Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (2008, 2010), Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood. Myths and Realities (2023) and several thematic journal clusters on children’s and YA literature and culture. Rudova is a co-founder of the international research group, ChEEER (Childhood in Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Russia), affiliated with ASEEES. Her numerous articles have been published in American, Canadian, European, and Russian journals and scholarly volumes. Her research interests include contemporary Russian popular culture and literature, children’s and YA literature, representations of childhood, East European and Russian cinema, and gender studies.