In separate interviews, Helena Goscilo addresses contemporary fiction by Russian women. Michael Moses discusses multiculturalism and the literary study of the third world.
Helena Goscilo discusses the cultural underpinnings that informed and shaped women Russian authors of fiction in the late twentieth century. Explaining that from World War II to at least the early 1990s, Russian women were forced to work full-time while shouldering all household tasks, she contends that while the Russian media blamed women for the contemporary breakdown in family values, the society provided no help to women in the form of sex education. At the time of the interview, Goscilo was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and was a Fellow of the National Humanities Center (1990-91).
In the second segment [14:47], Michael Valdez Moses discusses multiculturalism and the literary study of the third world. Moses recommends that a comparative approach be used to compare late twentieth-century third world literature ti Western canonical literature, and highlights themes shared by both, including imperial domination, detribalization, and loss of native language. According to Moses, decolonization, independence, establishment of national languages, and a rise in literacy gave many third world writers the freedom to write, a wider audience, and a landscape ripe for literary treatment. At the time of the interview, Michael Moses was professor of English at Duke University and later a Fellow at the National Humanities Center (2000-01).
This episode of Soundings was conducted by Wayne J. Pond.
