Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

Dr. Dmitri Sitchinava: "Gender Trouble im Slawischen: Genus, Sexus und Kongruenzklassen"

Zeit: 14:15

Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie, Raum 561

Workshop: Dr. Dmitrij Bresler (HU): "Aesopian Critique: Engaged Reading and the Social Life of the Text in the USSR"

Zeit: 10:00

Humboldt Universität, Hauptgebäude

In The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski analyzes the analytical framework that shaped a major strand of twentieth-century literary criticism. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, she defines critique as a mode of reading grounded in suspicion: the text is understood as a surface concealing deeper structures—an ideological apparatus, political logic, or psychoanalytic unconscious. The critic’s task is to demystify this hidden content and show how a text that appears, for instance, anti-war or humanistic may nevertheless reproduce mechanisms of power at the level of its structures. Comparable interpretive dynamics can be observed in Soviet reading culture, particularly in the practice of Aesopian language. Yet the model of interpretation associated with Aesopian discourse rests on a different premise. Under conditions of censorship, texts often reproduce official ideological formulas on the surface while suggesting alternative meanings through hints and semantic displacements. These meanings become legible to a critically engaged reader who searches the text for traces that allow it to be read against its declared meaning, turning the text into a kind of clue. In this sense, Aesopian language can be understood less as a property of individual works than as a mode of reading emerging under specific social conditions and shaping particular relations between text and reader. Just as critique, for Felski, does not exhaust the rhetorical potential of texts, Aesopian reading does not exhaust the critical model of reading “in-group”. The papers in this workshop propose to expand this perspective by examining Soviet reading as a broader spectrum of affects, forms of engagement, pleasures, and social relations that arise around texts and produce distinct socio-political effects. At the same time, the workshop invites participants to consider not only institutional and discursive practices but also the formal theory of literature, which conceptualized the social life of texts and reading practices under Soviet conditions. From this perspective, formalist theory itself may be understood as a model of socio-literary behavior, professional strategies, and regimes of publicity within the literary field of the 1920s–1980s.

Filmabend: Faust (SOME Film Club)

Zeit: 18:15

Dorotheenstraße 65, Raum 5.42

Vortrag: Ilya Kalinin (HU): "Die Frage nach der Technik: Русский формализм и критика отчуждения"

Zeit: 18:00

Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie, Raum 5.42

Minivanka-Workshop

Zeit: 16:00

Dorotheenstraße 65, Raum 5.45

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