Julia Vaingurt is a professor in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. She has published widely on Russian modernism and avant-garde, including a book, Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and Arts in Russia of the 1920s, and an edited volume, The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia (together with Colleen McQuillen). Her most recent book, Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late-Soviet Socialism, published by Northwestern University Press, examines a poetics of weakness in Soviet underground literature. Julia Vaingurt argues that this counter-discourse of strategic weakness constituted both an aesthetic strategy and an ethical code, affording like-minded authors a feeling of recognition and commonality and uniting an international community of artists in resistance to the divisiveness of their worlds. Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism explores the cultivation of weak subjectivity through modes such as gender subversion, queer holy foolishness, intoxication, madness, and writing disorders like graphomania and writer’s block. Identifying the poetics of weakness as formative for Soviet underground literature of the 1960s and ’70s, Vaingurt also traces the inheritance of a far older tradition of salutary weakness within Russian culture. As democratic deliberation continues to be under threat around the world, alternatives to the ubiquitous politics of force are an aesthetic, ethical, and ideological imperative.
Please note: Pursuant to persistent restrictions on campus access, we ask that if you would like to attend and you do not hold an active CUID, you write to me by noon of 7 April if you have not already, so that we have time to manually add you to a list of registered attendees. Thank you for your consideration—and for your patience.
Date: April 8
Time: 6:30-8:00 pm
Location: Hamilton Hall 709
