Bio:
Selin Berktas is a fourth-year undergraduate student in the English Literature department at the University of British Columbia. Selin’s academic interests include the Post-Soviet sphere, what defines it, what is beyond the “Post-Soviet,” and how literature and other forms of media are intertwined with these blurry definitions. Selin is committed to learning about how cultural work informs our understandings of lived experience, identity, and internationalism.
Project Description:
When Lermontov writes, “What wretched people!” in A Hero of Our Time, it is difficult to not connect it to Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Selin’s project aims to explore how Russian literature represents it’s past “peripheries,” how its literary traditions can construct and reinforce hierarchies, and how portrayals intersect with ideas of nationalism and self-romanticism, identity, and belonging in it’s so-called-periphery. The project, Rereading Russian Literature on the Account of its Periphery, investigates our understandings of classics through a lens of the empire’s neighbours, victim to Russian imperialism, and the sociopolitical influence of accredited literary classics. How do narratives continue their influence in the “Post-Soviet” sphere? How do these portrayals ‘other’ parts of their previous and current empire? What is the literary nature of expansionist rhetoric?