Oral History и дистопия: възходът на романа-анкета
Oral History and Dystopia: The Rise of the Inquiry Novel

Summary/Abstract: The genre examined in this text is not officially named. It is not even a genre, but rather a thin red trans-genre thread that runs through several books from different strata of contemporary literature, both connecting and subverting documentary and fiction, memory and speculation, tradition and experiment. These are novels constructed as inquiries, as a series of short interviews with a number of different people on a lived experience. These testimonies, with their fragmentation, subjectivity, and idiosyncrasy, form a larger and jarring picture. My thesis is that these works are symptomatic of today’s post-witness situation because they set new uses of oral history. How oral history is becoming a trope in contemporary fiction (including dystopian fiction) is traced through works by Svetlana Alexievich, Roberto Bolaño, Max Brooks, Olga Ravn.

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