Ani Kokobobo

akokobobo@ku.edu
Articles by Ani Kokobobo

On Not Talking about Gender in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature

As a graduate student in Russian literature, I wrote a dissertation and eventually a book about the body and the grotesque in nineteenth-century realism. As I look back, I can’t help but think that mine was a book that desperately sought to be about gender and sexuality. And it would have been about those things, if I were comfortable writing about gender or had the training then to do so. But the field of nineteenth-century Russian literary studies has tended to be more conservative about theory. I read Judith Butler and Foucault in grad school, but felt too intimidated to work with them, let alone Jack Halberstam and others. Instead, since I knew Bakhtin (nashi), I relied on his theory of the grotesque to talk about the body and not talk about sexuality. I talked about protruding bodies seeking to connect with the world, being integrated into other bodies — all the while dancing around and keeping at bay the menacing, actual penetration…of intercourse.

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An interview with Donna Orwin on her new book, “Simply Tolstoy”

We heard that Donna Orwin had just published a new book called “Simply Tolstoy” and had to find out all about it.

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The Soviet Moral Gray Zone: From Kantian Deontology to Maternal Ethics in Vassily Grossman’s “Everything Flows”

In the context of the Holocaust and other twentieth-century mass traumas, the Kantian Categorical Imperative, which underscores ethical transgression, can at times appear inadequate.

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Try a Little Tenderness: An Immigrant Story

All I have left from the first 14 years of my life is an envelope of old photographs.

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Immigrant Stories: A New Rubric at All the Russias

It seems like a good time to take pride in the diverse immigrant roots of our field by gathering immigrant stories.

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How Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ Can Inspire Those Who Fear Trump’s America

I can’t see Tolstoy wearing a pink pussy hat.

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Candid about the Camera: Tolstoy Scholars on Adapting Anna Karenina

Tolstoy can be so unforgiving with his ladies.

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Dostoevsky, Demons, and The Donald

It’s never a good sign when real life resembles a Dostoevsky novel.

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 Marital Happy Endings and Cultural Politics in a Contemporary Australian Adaptation of Anna Karenina

In our time, there is a definite expectation that people know what they want and ensure their own happiness.

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Love (Not Death): A Postmodern Tolstoy in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina

Despite flaws of both execution and interpretation, this most recent adaptation displays a genuinely intelligent understanding Tolstoy’s novel.

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