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"The Raw Material Of Talk:" Svetlana Alexievich's Literary And Humanistic Response To Suffering, Mana Hao Taylor

Senior Projects Spring 2019

This paper examines Svetlana Alexievich’s genre of documenting voices of survivors of traumatic Soviet experiences through three of her books: The Unwomanly Face of War: And Oral History of Women in World War Two, Voices from Chernobyl: An Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, and Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. It engages in a literary analysis based on the study of the narrative structure and the unique authorial techniques used by the author as a witness of other's pain and a listener actively engaged in the storytelling process. Studying these narratives of suffering, deprivation, and identity crises reveals …