UC Berkeley

Articulating an original reading strategy that builds on both American feminist affect theory and anthropological models of historical consciousness, this dissertation advances a new theoretical account of the role played by the sensory or bodily awareness of history in Polish and East German literature. Its argument consists of, on the one hand, an account historical experience in the state-socialist period in People’s Poland and in the German Democratic Republic that focuses on specific, qualitative experiences of historical time and that places them in their cultural contexts and historical genealogies. These qualitative temporalities appear as concrete amalgamations of emotion and time. The three such amalgamations on which this dissertation focuses are: Stalinist cheerfulness and its “elastic” sense of history; the empty lateness of pre-Solidarność Poland in the 1970s, and the atmospheric depression hanging over Berlin directly before the Mauerfall. On the other hand, this argument presents a theoretical account of historical consciousness as such, which uses the example of socialist historical consciousness to argue that the categories of feeling, affect, and emotion are, in fact, central to how history is experienced throughout Modernity. This is, again, a wholly original argument that builds on literary, historical, anthropological, and cultural-studies theory to advance a new understanding of historical time, outside of chronology, simultaneity, and forms of linear ordering. These readings of the Polish and East German literature are, at once, an attempt to deprovincialize the socialist novel by elucidating its universal claims about the relationship of historical knowledge to historical experience.