Books by Yuliya Komska
This book tells the story of the so-called "prayer wall"--the German wall that didn't fall in 198... more This book tells the story of the so-called "prayer wall"--the German wall that didn't fall in 1989. The first cultural studies account of the Iron Curtain, it highlights pilgrimage, tourism studies, religious studies, iconography, and narratology to explain why this civilian answer to the Cold War military barrier emerged and how it was used.
Eastern Europe has been infinitely more than just "the lands between" Russia and the West (Prusin... more Eastern Europe has been infinitely more than just "the lands between" Russia and the West (Prusin). The volume unmaps the area to show how, at various points in history, it resisted the cartographic mandate as much as other contiguities: linguistic, temporal, intellectual, ethnic, and religious. Instead, the contributors uncover and reflect upon alternative categories, images, histories, and self- designations that Eastern Europeans and their non-neighbors devised or borrowed to situate the region in a new set of coordinates, tacitly or quite explicitly resisting the traditional ones.
Co-edited with Irene Kacandes, Dartmouth College.
Journal articles by Yuliya Komska
New German Critique, 2023
Frequently, to be an immigrant is to be submerged in one’s new physical and institutional setting... more Frequently, to be an immigrant is to be submerged in one’s new physical and institutional settings, to be inside without feeling like an insider. The position is at odds with critique, which is traditionally predicated on distance. This article attempts to undo the contradiction between the two circumstances. From inside a unit that the preeminent postwar psychoanalyst and critic AlexanderMitscherlich helped plan for the developer Neue Heimat Städtebau in Emmertsgrund, outside Heidelberg in Germany’s southwest, it articulates a critique of his pedagogical foray into mass housing and urbanism. In the process, it stakes out a critical position for Germanists with immigrant backgrounds.
Two central assumptions inform the research on the literary languages of immi- grant and émigré w... more Two central assumptions inform the research on the literary languages of immi- grant and émigré writers. The first is that bilingual and polyglot authors tend to produce linguistically hybrid texts. The second is that publishers and their associ- ates are responsible for the occasions when this does not occur. To question both, this article focuses on the little-studied life and career of Margret and H.A. Rey, the well-known children’s book authors and illustrators and creators of the “Curi- ous George” series. What wider gamut of forces could have forged polyglot indi- viduals into monolingual authors and purveyors of monolingual publishing?
Lateral: A Journal of Cultural Studies (link)
Manifestos have resurfaced as fuel for firing political imaginations and calling people to action... more Manifestos have resurfaced as fuel for firing political imaginations and calling people to action in a threatening time. These texts express in clear, blunt, and broad terms what strategies might be used to address the urgent concerns of a shaken public. But what can they really accomplish? A rethinking of the limitations of manifestos—their panic-driven contexts, their emphasis on collectivities rather than individuals, the vagueness and combativeness of their language—suggests that there may be other more fruitful ways of instilling care of and for language in everyday life and politics. To this end, and picking up on past and present models of covenant-building that prioritize long-lasting change rather than quick fixes, we propose a chartist approach to language care. With due deference to Orwell for his intensive focus on the political dangers of not caring for language, we posit that his prescriptions can also inhibit our abilities to communicate in productive ways, across disparate communities that might stand to gain from breaking out of Orwellian strictures on political language and expression. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s call to “think what we are doing,” we propose as a starting point a language charter that will make language everyone’s business.
In recent years, monolingualism has become an object of renewed scholarly scrutiny. Divergent as ... more In recent years, monolingualism has become an object of renewed scholarly scrutiny. Divergent as they may be, accounts of its entrenchment typically concur that trade publishers, especially their Anglophone variety, have acted as catalysts in the process. This article questions the assumption by zooming in on the case of an established Boston-based house, Houghton Mifflin, during World War II, i.e. the time when paper rationing
and apprehensions about language loyalty did not bode well for the large numbers of literary submissions from American minorities and the many fresh-off-the-boat European refugees. Can Houghton Mifflin’s wartime archive—in particular, the so-called editorial blanks (papers recording the receipt of each manuscript, reader reviews, and the verdict)—count as a substantive repository of monolingualism at this critical point in history? More broadly, what can this archive’s World War II-era content tell us about the interdependencies between language, race, and trade publishing?
Journal of Cold War Studies, 2018
This paper contributes to the eco-history of Cold War broadcasting. It explains how the annals of... more This paper contributes to the eco-history of Cold War broadcasting. It explains how the annals of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a U.S.-funded broadcaster that was based in West Germany to serve five Eastern bloc countries, throw into sharp relief the fine line between the advantages of radio technologies and their pitfalls. The discussion focuses on a protracted conflict between RFE/RL and West Germany’s bird protection activists (1983-1993). What exactly was at stake in this fight over the station’s superior “killer technologies”: species protection, then newly adopted by the West German political mainstream, or anti-Americanism?
Heimat is commonly theorized as an entity both co-extensive with the nation and easily describabl... more Heimat is commonly theorized as an entity both co-extensive with the nation and easily describable in terms of its regional peculiarities (Eigenart). To challenge this view, this article turns to sociolinguistic discussions in the press of Sudeten German expellees in the early 1950s. Rather than speaking as experts on local dialects or folklore, these newcomers resorted to Sprachkritik, a widespread postwar public form of sociolinguistic criticism, to fashion Heimat into a prescriptive, normative authority over the High German standard that they found missing in the Federal Republic. Their attacks on the West German parlance focused on inability of its consumerist diminutives to produce a coherent narrative of the period. By suggesting that Heimat's parameters superseded those of the nation, their interventions countered the widespread cliché of inarticulate, rural expellees at the same time as they put Sprachkritik on the map of West Germany's "miracle years."
German Life and Letters, 2004
Book chapters by Yuliya Komska
Tales that Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture, 2022
Although the creatures did not look particularly unusual, Hans August Reyersbach fumbled for the ... more Although the creatures did not look particularly unusual, Hans August Reyersbach fumbled for the adjectives with which to describe them. He finally opted for a gaggle of non-committal attributes in-ish. "White-yellowish quills, dark brown on top, hairy nose, reddish muzzle," one annotation read. 1 "Face, head, back: whitish olive gray, body olive gray, the back darker. Paws, shoulders, thighs olive brown. Muzzle a brownish flesh color. Flesh pink soles. Bluish green claws," went another. Reyersbach, now known as children's author H. A. Rey, was sketching quickly, his soft graphite pencil flying across loose sheets of paper to trace little but the animals' roughest contours. A smattering of eyes, limbs, stripes, spots, or quills materialized. 2 All of those sheets were lined and obviously not intended for drawing. Did he stumble across the animals in the wild? Did they catch him off guard, without his draughtsman's materials? Because Hans would have hardly entered a zoo thus unprepared. Not only was he a compulsive zoo-goer, wherever his serial migrant life carried him from his native Hamburgfirst to Rio de Janeiro in 1925, then back to Hamburg in 1936, then to Paris in 1937, and finally to New York by way of Rio in 1940but those zoo visits also shaped his artist practice from the earliest years. Already as a child, Hans, pen and paper in hand, would make his way to a zoo. The zoo's proximity to the Jewish Reyersbachs' residences in the bourgeois district Harvestehude (the family moved several times, always within the same few blocks) comes up repeatedly in the sources, although the zoo is never identified it by name. Both of these circumstances suggest a reference to Hamburg's Zoological Garden. It was the city's original zoo, founded in 1860 by the merchant elites on the acres leased from the Hamburg Senate (the current site of the park 1 "Rodents & sundry," de Grummond Children's Literature Collection, University of Southern Mississippi, H.A. & Margret Rey Papers, DG0812, 137/18. Henceforth abbreviated as DGRP. The subsequent references are to the same file, unless otherwise indicated. 2 For consistency, I use "Hans August Reyersbach" to refer to H. A. Rey before his immigration to the United States in October 1940. While he did adopt "Rey" as an alias in Brazil, using it to sign his work, its appearance remained sporadic and unofficial.
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and... more All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.
Book Reviews by Yuliya Komska
American Historican Review, 2019
Central European History, 2017
Uploads
Books by Yuliya Komska
Co-edited with Irene Kacandes, Dartmouth College.
Journal articles by Yuliya Komska
and apprehensions about language loyalty did not bode well for the large numbers of literary submissions from American minorities and the many fresh-off-the-boat European refugees. Can Houghton Mifflin’s wartime archive—in particular, the so-called editorial blanks (papers recording the receipt of each manuscript, reader reviews, and the verdict)—count as a substantive repository of monolingualism at this critical point in history? More broadly, what can this archive’s World War II-era content tell us about the interdependencies between language, race, and trade publishing?
Book chapters by Yuliya Komska
Book Reviews by Yuliya Komska
Co-edited with Irene Kacandes, Dartmouth College.
and apprehensions about language loyalty did not bode well for the large numbers of literary submissions from American minorities and the many fresh-off-the-boat European refugees. Can Houghton Mifflin’s wartime archive—in particular, the so-called editorial blanks (papers recording the receipt of each manuscript, reader reviews, and the verdict)—count as a substantive repository of monolingualism at this critical point in history? More broadly, what can this archive’s World War II-era content tell us about the interdependencies between language, race, and trade publishing?
This term, the course will zoom in on three environments that German-speakers attempted to shape while being shaped by them: the forest, the mountains, and the zoo. They are culturally prominent examples, with many fascinating facets to explore from many unconventional angles. They afford opportunities for telling a less valedictorian story of Germanophone environmentalism (which often highlights the protest movements of the 20th and 21st c., occasionally to the exclusion of all else): over time, the intricate overlaps between nature and belonging and eventually, nation and nature have resulted in racist or xenophobic exclusion of people and in exploitation of animals. Understanding these pitfalls is crucial to devising an inclusive vision of environmentalism.