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Travels Through Heterotopia: The Textual Realms Of Patrick Modiano's Rue Des Boutiques Obscures And Mikhail Kuraev's Kapitan Dikshtein, Vitaly Chernetsky

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Within contemporary prose, one distinct mode or paradigm that can be discerned is constituted by the texts that daringly tackle the dark, suppressed, erased parts of our history and mentality; however, they approach this task not by way of self-righteous denunciatory investigations, but by provocatively problematizing the most established everyday facts, by depriving the reader of the possibility of even conceiving any firm ground of the stable construct of an origin or a self-identification—historically and culturally. Their irreverent and playful deconstruction of the all-pervasive national cultural mythologies has mounted a powerful challenge to ideological constructs big and small. This article …