The seminar will analyze the way totalitarian oppression was represented and resisted in literature of the second part of East-Central European 20th century. We will look through the lens of literature at the main political and historical issues that afflicted Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and other countries of the region. We will study texts (essays, memoirs, novels, short stories, plays, and poems) which offered various ways to resist moral and political oppression. The authors will include George Orwell, Franz Kafka (as a precursor), Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel, Tadeusz Borowski, Bertolt Brecht, Herta Muller.
