Writing Postcommunism: Towards a Literature of East European Ruins

Writing Postcommunism is David Williams' personal odyssey. It combines his interest in comparative literature with reflections on his time spent working and travelling in Bosnia, Croatia, Germany, and Serbia in the late 1990s and 2000s. Williams argues that a significant body of post-communist literature is characterised by the semantic field of ruins, with recurring themes of melancholia and nostalgia, remembering and forgetting. He proposes the term 'Trmmerliteratur Redux' as a literary-historical framework for a 'literature of the post-1989 East European ruins' and the 'post-1989 ruins of East European literature'. From the outset, Williams states that he is not attempting a comprehensive survey in the manner of Andrew Wachtel's ambitious work on post-1989 Eastern European literary developments, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (2006). Instead, Williams uses particular writers as entry points into a discussion of East European and (post-)Yugoslav 'literature of ruins'.