Textual Quilting and Subversive Re(-)Collection: War & Feminine Discourse in Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War

Abstract

In her book The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich presents a new way of writing; one which stands in contrast to previous works of war literature by narrating from beyond the confines of censorship and dominant discourse. The writer does not exercise full "authorship" over the story she tells; instead, she shares this role by piecing together interviews from women who had formerly served as soldiers in the Soviet army in order to create a larger narrative about the Second World War. One might decribe Alexievich‘s work as a kind of "textual quilting"; she harvests individual first-hand accounts of war and then weaves them together in order to depict larger collective histories. This work highlights the characteristics which differentiate Alexievich‘s work from traditional Soviet War Literature, thereby allowing for its classification as another distinct literary genre.