Imagining Alternative Futures: Ghosts and Saviours on the Semi-Periphery of World-Literature

This research project is a contribution to literary and cultural studies. It offers a new perspective on urgent social phenomena by examining contemporary artistic forms at the global semi-periphery – a much-neglected region of world-literary study. It does so by devising an interdisciplinary approach which builds on emerging literary, social and cultural theories. By identifying alternative political imaginaries in literary form, this project contributes to the identification of proleptic signs of social change. In comparison with the canonized and currently hegemonic Anglophone tradition, semi-peripheral utopias, sci-fi and hybridized genres of literary fiction provide a new perspective on the world. In this project I focus on the European semi-periphery and post-1990 Ukrainian fiction. At the same time, the recurrent tropes and aesthetic structures find striking parallels in other semi-peripheral literatures (Belarusian, Hungarian, Bosnian, Estonian), thus tying the Ukrainian literary imagination to the literary history of the “World Republic of Letters” (Casanova) and making its discussion directly relevant to literary and cultural studies in general.