Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry

This book challenges the belief in the purely linguistic nature of contemporary poetry and offers an interpretation of late twentieth-century Russian poetry as a testimony to the unforeseen annulment of communist reality and its overnight displacement by a completely unfathomable post-totalitarian order. <br/><br/>Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva argues that because of the sudden invalidation of a reality that had been largely seen as unattained and everlasting this shift remained secluded from the mind and totally resistant to cognition thus causing a collectively traumatic psychological experience. The book proceeds by inquiring into a school of contemporary American poetry that has been likewise read as cut off from reality. <br/><br/>Executing a comparative analysis Vassileva advances a new understanding of this poetry as a testimony to the overwhelming and traumatic impact of contemporary media which have assailed the mind with far more signals than it can register digest and furnish with semantic weight.