1st Edition
Underground Modernity Urban Poetics in East-Central Europe, Pre- and Post-1989
By Alfrun Kliems
Copyright 2021
340 Pages
by
Central European University Press
The literary scholar Alfrun Kliems explores the aesthetic strategies of Eastern European underground literature, art, film and music in the decades before and after the fall of communism, ranging from the ‘father’ of Prague Underground, Egon Bondy, to the neo-Dada Club of Polish Losers in Berlin. The works she considers are underground in the sense that they were produced illegally,... Read more
Acknowledgments, Preface PART I. TypologyThe Underground and the City, Pre- and Post-1989: An Effort to Interweave ConceptsParanoid Schizophrenia: Dissent, the Underground, and Cultural FissureSubverting Official Claims to Centrality: Overcity/Undercity, City/Country, East/WestVerticality as Metaphor: The Romantic Era and the Underground as a Historical Location PART II. Figures, Works, GroupsLast Exit: Egon Bondy's Anti-flâneurs under the Wheels of Madame PragueUrban Disaffiliation: The Swan Songs of Ivan Martin JirousDisgusted in Bratislava: Vladimír Archleb's Lyrically Vulgar DandyismChrist Quieted: Marcin ?wietlicki, Kraków, the Underground, and PopThe Joy of Failure, or Underground and Generation: Jacek Podsiad?o's Road Story en Route to BratislavaMy City's Me, It's Many: Peter Firefly Wawerzinek, the Palaverer of Prenzlauer BergAnticolonial Myth, Pop, Punk—and the End of the Underground? The Topol Brothers' Dog Soldiers SongsRomani and Vietnamese in Prague: Jáchym Topol Bids Farewell to the Tripolis PragaA Detour to Moscow: Vladimir Makanin's Underground Fantasies, or the Snare of the SubterraneanCherboslovats, Romongolians, Sweeks: Yuri Andrukhovych's Moscow as a Junkspace of CulturesPlanar Cities and Their Urban Devastation: Andrzej Stasiuk's Post-Socialist WarsawAggressive Localism: Andrzej Stasiuk and Yuri Andrukhovych as Secretaries of the ProvincialBackstory Metropolis, Mass, Meat Factory: Tot Art, the Orange Alternative, and Other Chefs of the Semantic PorridgeIt All Started in Gda?sk!: Berlin's Club of Polish LosersConclusion or, Entropy of the Underground,Bibliography, List of Illustrations, Name Index
Biography
Alfrun Kliems is a professor of West Slavonic Literatures and Cultures at Humboldt University of Berlin and co-editor of The Post-Socialist City (2010) and Performance – Cinema – Sound: Perspectives and Retrospectives in Central and Eastern Europe (2019).
