David Williams | The University of Auckland (original) (raw)
Books by David Williams
Moving through the elegiac ruins of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav disintegration, Writing Post... more Moving through the elegiac ruins of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav disintegration, Writing Postcommunism explores literary evocations of the pervasive disappointment and mourning that have marked the postcommunist twilight. With particular reference to the writings of Croatian émigré Dubravka Ugrešić, and to those, amongst others, of Milan Kundera, Clemens Meyer, Ingo Schulze, Jáchym Topol, and Christa Wolf, it is argued that a significant body of postcommunist literature is underpinned and scarred by the semantic field of ruins: melancholia and nostalgia, presence and absence, pride and shame, and not least, remembering and forgetting. Taken together, the writings considered suggest a post-1989 'literature of the ruins’, an amorphous, anti-formative framework that also dramatically illuminates the post-1989 ruins of east European literature itself – what remains when, as György Konrád put it, ‘something is over’.
Book Translations by David Williams
A mother, a father and a son face illness and the new restrictions of a declared pandemic in the ... more A mother, a father and a son face illness and the new restrictions of a declared pandemic in the context of their native Croatia. The dream of returning as a family to the sun-soaked terrace of their home in Dalmatia is what inspires them to face - and conquer all. Ivica Prtenjača is a quiet novelist at ease in his craft, restrained in his narrative voice, while confident that his characters and their meandering fates will do their work on the reader. Let's Go Home, Son has got everything it needs. Family values, loss, guilt, shame, love, disappointment and cautious hope.
With characteristic wit and narrative force, Fox takes us from Russia to Japan, through Balkan mi... more With characteristic wit and narrative force, Fox takes us from Russia to Japan, through Balkan minefields and American road trips, and from the 1920s to the present, as it explores the power of storytelling and literary invention, notions of betrayal, and the randomness of human lives and biographies.
Using the duplicitous and shape-shifting fox of Eastern folklore as a motif, Ugresic constructs a novel that reinvents itself over and over, blending nuggets of literary trivia (like how Nabokov named the Neonympha dorothea dorothea butterfly after the woman who drove him cross-country), with the timeless story of a woman trying to escape her hometown and find love to magical effect.
Propelled by literary footnotes and “minor” characters, Fox is vintage Ugresic, recovering the voices of those on the margins with a verve that’s impassioned, learned, and hilarious
Extracts from the collection's title essay can be found in the attachment. One of the funniest... more Extracts from the collection's title essay can be found in the attachment.
One of the funniest essays in the collection is online here:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/10/17/assault-on-the-minibar/
Praise for Karaoke Culture:
"Ugresic’s anecdotes and aperçus are as irresistibly quotable . . . as they are haunting." Ruth Franklin, The New Republic
"With its deadpan humour just this side of heartbreak, the 50 pages of 'A Question of Perspective' – which recounts her heresies, persecution and flight from the madness of Croatian nationalism - counts as a classic testimony of our times." Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
"There’s a perpetual sense of wonder in these essays, and substantial doses of ironic wit, which Ugresic’s translator from Croatian, David Williams, pulls off with great panache." Jean Harris, Words without Borders
Hurtling between Weltschmerz and wit, drollness and diatribe, entropy and enchantment, it’s the j... more Hurtling between Weltschmerz and wit, drollness and diatribe, entropy and enchantment, it’s the juxtaposition at the heart of Dubravka Ugresic’s writings that saw Ruth Franklin dub her “the fantasy cultural studies professor you never had.” In Europe in Sepia, Ugresic, ever the flaneur, wanders from the Midwest to Zucotti Park, the Irish Aran Islands to Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim, from the tristesse of Dutch housing estates to the riots of south London, charting everything from the acedia of Central Europe to the ennui of the Low Countries. One finger on the pulse of an exhausted Europe, another in the wounds of postindustrial America, Ugresic trawls the fallout of political failure and the detritus of popular culture, mining each for revelation.
Infused with compassion and melancholic doubt, Europe in Sepia centers on the disappearance of the future, the anxiety that no new utopian visions have emerged from the ruins of communism; that ours is a time of irreducable nostalgia, our surrender to pastism complete. Punctuated by the levity of Ugresic’s raucous instinct for the absurd, despair has seldom been so beguiling.
Refereed Articles by David Williams
World Literature Today, Nov 2014
While the masses may be titillated by reading Fifty Shades of Grey, do others find similar releas... more While the masses may be titillated by reading Fifty Shades of Grey, do others find similar release in Oksanen’s Purge? Despite the differences between entertainment and enlightenment, perhaps the line between low and high culture is more porous than we thought.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, belles paroles such as ‘Europe without borders’ and ‘th... more With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, belles paroles such as ‘Europe without borders’ and ‘the family of European nations’ announced in discourse - if not in reality – the ‘reunification of Europe.’ However, as the years of perpetual transition wore on, many Eastern European writers and intellectuals began to suggest Anschluss as a more appropriate description of East-West rapprochement. In fiction and in feuilletons, these writers and intellectuals pointed to the fact that while communism may have become water over the dam, generations of Eastern Europeans, unable to find their feet in the new circumstances, were drowning in the flood of Europe’s ‘new happiness.’ This paper considers Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel Ministarstvo boli (The Ministry of Pain, 2004) and Milan Kundera’s L’ignorance (Ignorance, 2000) as alternative narratives of the post-Wende years; attempts to articulate the experiences of those whom Svetlana Boym would call “Europeans without euros.”
Comparative Critical Studies, 2013
This article offers a comparative reading of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno (2000) and ... more This article offers a comparative reading of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno (2000) and Nowhere Man (2002) and Saša Stanišić’s Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, 2006), focusing on the effects of the Bosnian War on the external and internal trajectories of their young male protagonists. Exiled in the United States and Germany respectively, these protagonists for the most part experience the war as an indirect and mediated event. Tracking their struggle to ‘reconstitute’ themselves as fledgling American and German denizens, it examines the sense of displacement their removal and survival engenders, and the intersections of this displacement with constructions of self and other.
Chapters by David Williams
Post-Panslavismus: Slavizität, Slavische Idee und Antislavismus im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert, May 2014
Spielplätze der Verweigerung: Gegen/kulturelle Topographien und Inszenierungsweisen in Ost-Mittel-Europa ab 1956 , May 2014
Spielplätze der Verweigerung" verweisen auf Alternativen zum Offiziellen, zum kulturell Akzeptier... more Spielplätze der Verweigerung" verweisen auf Alternativen zum Offiziellen, zum kulturell Akzeptierten und staatlich Sanktionierten. Nicht der laute Protest, son dern die leise Störung verbindlicher Ordnungen zeichnen diese Formen spiele rischer Widerständigkeit aus: Alltägliches in der Kunst, ein anderer Kamerablick auf die sozialistische Realität, Töne aus dem falschen Lager und das Lachen des öffentlichen Happenings. Der Band widmet sich solchen Phänomenen im östlichen Europa zwischen 1956 und der "Wende" sowie ihrem Schicksal nach 1989. Die Autoren und Autorinnen verhandeln an Bei spielen aus Literatur, Kunst, Film, Musik und Architektur Ästhetiken der Verweigerung und Strategien des Sub versiven, Politischen und der Inter vention im (post-)sozialistischen Raum. Christine Gölz ist Slawistin und Fachkoordinatorin für Literaturwissenschaft am Geisteswissenschaftlichen Zentrum für Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas an der Universität Leipzig. Alfrun Kliems ist Professorin für Westslawische Litera turen und Kulturen an GEGENkULTUREN IM öSTLICHEN EUROpA NACH 1956 2014. 506 s. 52 s/W-unD 14 fArB. ABB. GB. 170 X 240 mm. € 74,90 [D] | € 77,00 [A] | isBn 978-3-412-22268-0 böhlau verlag gmbh & cie., ursulaplatz 1, d-50668 köln, t: + 49 221 913 90-0, f: + 49 221 913 90-11 info@boehlau-verlag.com, www.boehlau-verlag.com | wien köln weimar
This chapter centres on the fiction of Dubravka Ugrešić and her attempts to marry literary aesthe... more This chapter centres on the fiction of Dubravka Ugrešić and her attempts to marry literary aesthetics with ethical engagement in the wake of the Yugoslav disintegration. It traces her passage from being a writer of witty metafiction, scholar of the Russian avantgarde, devotee of Borges, and adherent of l’art pour l’art, to her post-Yugoslav efforts to reconcile the conflict between the writer as homo poeticus and homo politicus. More broadly, it argues that the Yugoslav experience of post-communism has been marked by the dramatic politicisation of a literary and cultural space that many Yugoslav writers had long held to be one of the most autonomous in Europe.
The Everyday of Memory: Between Communism and Postcommunism, edited by Marta Rabikowska. Oxford: Peter Lang (forthcoming 2013)
Essays by David Williams
World Literature Today
This essay was an invited contribution to World Literature Today's "Translator's Tuesday." Altho... more This essay was an invited contribution to World Literature Today's "Translator's Tuesday." Although a distinctly personal essay, my main point is that literature in translation is a state-sponsored art, and, that like the Olympics, as a general rule, who spends most wins. As a natural consequence of this set-up, long term, it's very difficult for the "losers" (all those who translate from the languages of poorer countries) to keep playing the game.
Baltic Worlds (VI: 3–4), pp. 4–9, Jan 21, 2014
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film (Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni, and John White, eds.), Feb 1, 2014
Reviews by David Williams
Slavic and East European Journal (58.1), Apr 2014
Moving through the elegiac ruins of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav disintegration, Writing Post... more Moving through the elegiac ruins of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav disintegration, Writing Postcommunism explores literary evocations of the pervasive disappointment and mourning that have marked the postcommunist twilight. With particular reference to the writings of Croatian émigré Dubravka Ugrešić, and to those, amongst others, of Milan Kundera, Clemens Meyer, Ingo Schulze, Jáchym Topol, and Christa Wolf, it is argued that a significant body of postcommunist literature is underpinned and scarred by the semantic field of ruins: melancholia and nostalgia, presence and absence, pride and shame, and not least, remembering and forgetting. Taken together, the writings considered suggest a post-1989 'literature of the ruins’, an amorphous, anti-formative framework that also dramatically illuminates the post-1989 ruins of east European literature itself – what remains when, as György Konrád put it, ‘something is over’.
A mother, a father and a son face illness and the new restrictions of a declared pandemic in the ... more A mother, a father and a son face illness and the new restrictions of a declared pandemic in the context of their native Croatia. The dream of returning as a family to the sun-soaked terrace of their home in Dalmatia is what inspires them to face - and conquer all. Ivica Prtenjača is a quiet novelist at ease in his craft, restrained in his narrative voice, while confident that his characters and their meandering fates will do their work on the reader. Let's Go Home, Son has got everything it needs. Family values, loss, guilt, shame, love, disappointment and cautious hope.
With characteristic wit and narrative force, Fox takes us from Russia to Japan, through Balkan mi... more With characteristic wit and narrative force, Fox takes us from Russia to Japan, through Balkan minefields and American road trips, and from the 1920s to the present, as it explores the power of storytelling and literary invention, notions of betrayal, and the randomness of human lives and biographies.
Using the duplicitous and shape-shifting fox of Eastern folklore as a motif, Ugresic constructs a novel that reinvents itself over and over, blending nuggets of literary trivia (like how Nabokov named the Neonympha dorothea dorothea butterfly after the woman who drove him cross-country), with the timeless story of a woman trying to escape her hometown and find love to magical effect.
Propelled by literary footnotes and “minor” characters, Fox is vintage Ugresic, recovering the voices of those on the margins with a verve that’s impassioned, learned, and hilarious
Extracts from the collection's title essay can be found in the attachment. One of the funniest... more Extracts from the collection's title essay can be found in the attachment.
One of the funniest essays in the collection is online here:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/10/17/assault-on-the-minibar/
Praise for Karaoke Culture:
"Ugresic’s anecdotes and aperçus are as irresistibly quotable . . . as they are haunting." Ruth Franklin, The New Republic
"With its deadpan humour just this side of heartbreak, the 50 pages of 'A Question of Perspective' – which recounts her heresies, persecution and flight from the madness of Croatian nationalism - counts as a classic testimony of our times." Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
"There’s a perpetual sense of wonder in these essays, and substantial doses of ironic wit, which Ugresic’s translator from Croatian, David Williams, pulls off with great panache." Jean Harris, Words without Borders
Hurtling between Weltschmerz and wit, drollness and diatribe, entropy and enchantment, it’s the j... more Hurtling between Weltschmerz and wit, drollness and diatribe, entropy and enchantment, it’s the juxtaposition at the heart of Dubravka Ugresic’s writings that saw Ruth Franklin dub her “the fantasy cultural studies professor you never had.” In Europe in Sepia, Ugresic, ever the flaneur, wanders from the Midwest to Zucotti Park, the Irish Aran Islands to Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim, from the tristesse of Dutch housing estates to the riots of south London, charting everything from the acedia of Central Europe to the ennui of the Low Countries. One finger on the pulse of an exhausted Europe, another in the wounds of postindustrial America, Ugresic trawls the fallout of political failure and the detritus of popular culture, mining each for revelation.
Infused with compassion and melancholic doubt, Europe in Sepia centers on the disappearance of the future, the anxiety that no new utopian visions have emerged from the ruins of communism; that ours is a time of irreducable nostalgia, our surrender to pastism complete. Punctuated by the levity of Ugresic’s raucous instinct for the absurd, despair has seldom been so beguiling.
World Literature Today, Nov 2014
While the masses may be titillated by reading Fifty Shades of Grey, do others find similar releas... more While the masses may be titillated by reading Fifty Shades of Grey, do others find similar release in Oksanen’s Purge? Despite the differences between entertainment and enlightenment, perhaps the line between low and high culture is more porous than we thought.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, belles paroles such as ‘Europe without borders’ and ‘th... more With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, belles paroles such as ‘Europe without borders’ and ‘the family of European nations’ announced in discourse - if not in reality – the ‘reunification of Europe.’ However, as the years of perpetual transition wore on, many Eastern European writers and intellectuals began to suggest Anschluss as a more appropriate description of East-West rapprochement. In fiction and in feuilletons, these writers and intellectuals pointed to the fact that while communism may have become water over the dam, generations of Eastern Europeans, unable to find their feet in the new circumstances, were drowning in the flood of Europe’s ‘new happiness.’ This paper considers Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel Ministarstvo boli (The Ministry of Pain, 2004) and Milan Kundera’s L’ignorance (Ignorance, 2000) as alternative narratives of the post-Wende years; attempts to articulate the experiences of those whom Svetlana Boym would call “Europeans without euros.”
Comparative Critical Studies, 2013
This article offers a comparative reading of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno (2000) and ... more This article offers a comparative reading of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno (2000) and Nowhere Man (2002) and Saša Stanišić’s Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, 2006), focusing on the effects of the Bosnian War on the external and internal trajectories of their young male protagonists. Exiled in the United States and Germany respectively, these protagonists for the most part experience the war as an indirect and mediated event. Tracking their struggle to ‘reconstitute’ themselves as fledgling American and German denizens, it examines the sense of displacement their removal and survival engenders, and the intersections of this displacement with constructions of self and other.
Post-Panslavismus: Slavizität, Slavische Idee und Antislavismus im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert, May 2014
Spielplätze der Verweigerung: Gegen/kulturelle Topographien und Inszenierungsweisen in Ost-Mittel-Europa ab 1956 , May 2014
Spielplätze der Verweigerung" verweisen auf Alternativen zum Offiziellen, zum kulturell Akzeptier... more Spielplätze der Verweigerung" verweisen auf Alternativen zum Offiziellen, zum kulturell Akzeptierten und staatlich Sanktionierten. Nicht der laute Protest, son dern die leise Störung verbindlicher Ordnungen zeichnen diese Formen spiele rischer Widerständigkeit aus: Alltägliches in der Kunst, ein anderer Kamerablick auf die sozialistische Realität, Töne aus dem falschen Lager und das Lachen des öffentlichen Happenings. Der Band widmet sich solchen Phänomenen im östlichen Europa zwischen 1956 und der "Wende" sowie ihrem Schicksal nach 1989. Die Autoren und Autorinnen verhandeln an Bei spielen aus Literatur, Kunst, Film, Musik und Architektur Ästhetiken der Verweigerung und Strategien des Sub versiven, Politischen und der Inter vention im (post-)sozialistischen Raum. Christine Gölz ist Slawistin und Fachkoordinatorin für Literaturwissenschaft am Geisteswissenschaftlichen Zentrum für Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas an der Universität Leipzig. Alfrun Kliems ist Professorin für Westslawische Litera turen und Kulturen an GEGENkULTUREN IM öSTLICHEN EUROpA NACH 1956 2014. 506 s. 52 s/W-unD 14 fArB. ABB. GB. 170 X 240 mm. € 74,90 [D] | € 77,00 [A] | isBn 978-3-412-22268-0 böhlau verlag gmbh & cie., ursulaplatz 1, d-50668 köln, t: + 49 221 913 90-0, f: + 49 221 913 90-11 info@boehlau-verlag.com, www.boehlau-verlag.com | wien köln weimar
This chapter centres on the fiction of Dubravka Ugrešić and her attempts to marry literary aesthe... more This chapter centres on the fiction of Dubravka Ugrešić and her attempts to marry literary aesthetics with ethical engagement in the wake of the Yugoslav disintegration. It traces her passage from being a writer of witty metafiction, scholar of the Russian avantgarde, devotee of Borges, and adherent of l’art pour l’art, to her post-Yugoslav efforts to reconcile the conflict between the writer as homo poeticus and homo politicus. More broadly, it argues that the Yugoslav experience of post-communism has been marked by the dramatic politicisation of a literary and cultural space that many Yugoslav writers had long held to be one of the most autonomous in Europe.
The Everyday of Memory: Between Communism and Postcommunism, edited by Marta Rabikowska. Oxford: Peter Lang (forthcoming 2013)
World Literature Today
This essay was an invited contribution to World Literature Today's "Translator's Tuesday." Altho... more This essay was an invited contribution to World Literature Today's "Translator's Tuesday." Although a distinctly personal essay, my main point is that literature in translation is a state-sponsored art, and, that like the Olympics, as a general rule, who spends most wins. As a natural consequence of this set-up, long term, it's very difficult for the "losers" (all those who translate from the languages of poorer countries) to keep playing the game.
Baltic Worlds (VI: 3–4), pp. 4–9, Jan 21, 2014
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film (Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni, and John White, eds.), Feb 1, 2014