The End of the Party: Representations of Post-Socialist Memory

Description from DukeHub

This course examines how the socialist past is remembered and debated in contemporary literature and film from the former Eastern Bloc and the former Soviet Union. Focusing on cultural production from countries including the GDR, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Albania, Romania, Russia, and Belarus, the course explores how writers and filmmakers respond to political ruptures, loss, and the collapse of shared futures. Rather than treating socialism as a closed historical period, the course considers it as a past that continues to shape the present through memory, nostalgia, and unresolved historical tensions. Students analyze how cultural texts narrate historical change and assign meaning to the past across different national, generic, and media contexts.

Skills

• public speakingtitle: "representations"

AI-resilient: 1 of 5 1/5

• No: Physical, lab or field work
• No: Live work with people
• No: Judgment someone is accountable for
• No: A craft you practice with your hands or body
• ✓Yes: Small, in-person format · seminar, 15 seats per section

The checks lean on Microsoft Research, Working with AI (2025), which found generative AI applies least to physical work and hands-on work with people. A signal, not a promise. How the score works