Culture Talk by Iryna Dumchak

The English Department is glad to invite you to

to an interesting public lecture

by

Iryna Dumchak, CSc.

researcher and external lecturer, Technical University of Liberec
visiting researcher, Charles University
associate professor, Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University

Farewell to Motherland: Narrative Identity in Ukrainian-American Studies
May 16, 2023, 12.30 pm, P004

Narrative identity is the story a human constructs to tell about themselves in order to understand who they are for themselves and for others. A cultural context is that one which influences the development of narrative identity rooted in "its origins in conversations between parents and their young children to the articulation of sophisticated meaning-making strategies in the personal stories told in adolescence and the emerging adulthood years."

Ukrainian/Canadian/Jewish narrative identity which could be traced in Askold Melnyczuk's, Irene Zabytko's, Claire Messud's, Jonathan Safran Foer's stories is represented by searching themselves not only within the context of their ancestors' homeland but also within the conditions of the new reality they, ancestors, happened to live and survive and their children were born and try understanding their "double" identity.

Farewell to motherland as a border situation is observed in the characters' attempts to leave their past behind or/and live with memories to the end of the life with/without their right for the future.

Iryna Dumchak, CSc. was named assistant professor of English Philology by the Ukrainian Ministry of Education in 2012, and holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatiuk National Pedagogical University and a master's degree in English Philology from Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University. Dr. Dumchak has been an external visiting researcher at Charles University since 2022, and is a researcher and external lecturer at the Technical University of Liberec in the 2022/2023 academic year.