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Glos Center
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio 45056
(513) 529-7592
(513) 529-1950 fax
newsinfo@muohio.edu
News Release
Miami professor author of book on Russian women writers04/03/2009 |
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Sutcliffe teaches Russian in Miami’s department of German, Russian and East Asian languages. The Prose of Life examines how six female authors employed images of daily life (byt) to depict women’s experience in Russian culture from the 1960s to the present. Byt, a term connoting both the everyday and its many petty problems, is an enduring yet neglected theme in Russian literature: its very ordinariness causes many critics to ignore it. Sutcliffe’s study is the first sustained examination of how and why everyday life as a literary and philosophical category catalyzed the development of post-Stalinist Russian women’s prose, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Adele Barker of the University of Arizona said: “Sutcliffe lifts women’s writing out of a category to which it was long consigned and shows how their works, grounded in everyday life, address larger issues in Soviet and post-Soviet society that transcend the gender divisions within Russian and Soviet literature.” Women authors discussed are Natal’ia Baranskaia, Irina Grekova, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Tat’iana Tolstaia, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Svetlana Vasilenko. Publication of the book was made possible, in part, through support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Miami University funded two recent research trips to Russia for Sutcliffe to gather materials for the book. Sutcliffe joined Miami’s faculty in 2004. He received a bachelor’s degree from Reed College and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Pittsburgh. |
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