This workshop addresses questions of time and temporality in Central and Eastern European literatures from queer perspectives, with a focus on Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Russia. Organized within the framework of EUTIM project, it explores how questions of time, sexuality, and literary form intersect across different historical moments and cultural settings.
Over the past decades, queer temporality—developed and articulated in literary and cultural theory by scholars such as Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, Lee Edelman, and José Esteban Muñoz—has provided a way to describe and analyze literary conceptualizations of time in relation to queer experience, desire, and intimacy. Rather than treating time as linear or developmental, this scholarship has emphasized temporal phenomena such as delay, belatedness, interruption, repetition, and alternative temporal horizons. While approaches to queer temporality differ in their political implications and theoretical commitments, they share a concern with how dominant temporal regimes structure belonging, futurity, inclusion, and exclusion.
In the literary contexts of Central and Eastern Europe of the 20th and 21st centuries, questions of queer time intersect with particular historical conditions, including censorship, displacement, the fragmentation and uneven transmission of literary heritage, and shifting regimes of visibility, as well as with culturally specific ways of articulating same-sex desire. Against this background, the workshop brings together work on different literary traditions and languages to explore how literary texts engage with temporal structures through representations of sexuality, attachment, and non-aligned life trajectories shaped by political rupture, social transformation, and migration.
The workshop foregrounds literary analysis of a wide range of textual materials, including poetry, prose, drama, essays, diaries, correspondence, and other forms of life writing, in which temporal experience becomes narratively legible. Special attention is given to problems of archival absence, fragmentary textual survival, and locally situated narrative practices, understood not only as methodological challenges but also as constitutive elements of queer temporal experience.
Alongside research on lesser-known or understudied authors and corpora, the workshop also invites renewed engagement with more established figures commonly associated with queer literary history. In such cases, the emphasis lies on re-examining their temporal configurations and literary forms, rather than on reaffirming their canonical status.
The workshop will result in an edited volume featuring contributions from participants.
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