INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDIES OF GALICIA: SEMINARS
Seminars
INTERDISCIPLINARY SEMINAR ON JEWISH-UKRAINIAN RELATIONS IN INTERWAR EASTERN GALICIA (modern Ukraine): 1918 -1939
We entertain a figurative conception of Ukrainian and Jewish apartness in a sense of two parallels. Both societies attempted to reach their own, largely incompatible goals. The agendas and political pursuits of both communities were in most instances distinctively opposite and intractable for mutual rapport and rapprochement. At the same time, the picture of Ukrainian-Jewish relations in interwar East Galicia would be incomplete without registering a phenomenon of the periodically arising affinities, that largely were evoked by the third and dominating force, namely the Polish state apparatus. We are in the position to argue that Ukrainian and Jewish objectives could warrant a certain number of common actions. The latter eventuated in encounters between two subjectivities at least within the realm of existential situations. We connote these virtually crossed parallels of subjectivities as the instances of togetherness in action.
EASTERN GALICIAN DISCOURSE: SEMINARS
Folklore and Legends
Seminar 1 in Two Parts
NEW VISION OF HISTORIC EASTERN GALICIA
Part I: Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish Imagined Communities “Who found this Land.”
Austrian Constitutional Era, 1867 – 1914.
Part II: State, National, and Ethnoreligious Communities “Who claim to own this
Land?” Interwar Period of the Second Polish Republic, 1918 -1939.
Seminar 2
Ivan Franko: for the Jews, against the Jews, or by the Jews
Representation of Galician Jews in his prose, poetry, and journalistic works.
I If there were two antagonistic camps depicted in the cycle of Borysław Laughs stories: Jewish entrepreneurs and Ruthenian workers.
II Pettiness and compassion in the cycle of Jewish Melodies, single verses, and longer poetry.
III Ivan Franko: positioning in support to the Zionist appeal for Jewish national and cultural liberation. Moses by Ivan Franko as a revolutionary interpretation of the Old Testament. His vision of Jewish future in Crossing Passes and in journalistic and scholarly activity.
IV. De-constructing stereotypes of Franko’s philosemitism and antisemitism.
SEMINAR 8
Ivan Franko, Joseph Roth, and Bruno Schulz: Perception of Galicia from personal sensations to literary works.
Ivan Franko: Galicia as a found or owned land. His vision of Galicia through the lens of imperial crownland and ethnic Ukrainian territory, epistemic implementation and political discourse.
Ivan Franko, personal history: Galicia, the place of suffering – the love betrayed, societal dismissal, and criminal persecutions.
Ivan Franko: constant discourse of contested political positions. His eternal struggle for truth, normalization, and self-realization in Ukrainian Galician society.
Joseph Roth, poet of departing Austrian imperial order. Anguish and Nostalgia.
Joseph Roth: Radetzky March and One Hundred Days, two contextually related narratives. Regardless of place and time the author remains committed to the ideation of honor and loyalty, largely not appreciated and understood by always rational mainstream.
Anxiety for the gone imperial order and for his own place in an imaginary world of Radetzky March.
Epistemic position of postimperial Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian writers of the former monarchy in a new national cultural milieu.
Bruno Schulz, writer-philosopher of his inner world. Universalism and ubiquity of Schulz’s literary creativity.
Polishness of Bruno Schulz and his perception of Galicia. If he regarded it a distinct cultural entity and inherited a Habsburg period regional identity? If the post-Holocaust Jewish and Ukrainian attribution to Schulz’s legacy historically substantiated?
Schulz’s modernist depiction of Drohobycz – indirect association or dissociation with the real place and time.
Singularity of Schulz in the Polish interwar literature. If a modernist literary conception applicable to interpretive analysis of his texts?