Dina Khapaeva

My research comprises literary criticism, cultural studies, death studies and historical memory. My forthcoming book The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture (The University of Michigan Press, 2017) investigates the cult of death, a distinctive way of engaging with death that crystallized in Western culture in the late 1980s and the 1990s. The book offers a conceptual framework that explains the mounting demand for images of violent death in fictional world - the Harry Potter series, The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, - and the dramatic recent changes in death-related social rituals and practices. It presents the celebration of death in the context of a longstanding critique of humanism and explores the role played by 20th-century French theory, as well as by posthumanism, transhumanism, and the animal rights movement, in the formation of this defining phenomenon of our age.
My interest in representations of death has grown from my research of literary representations of nightmares. In my book Nightmare: From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project, (Brill, 2013) I argue that the roots of contemporary cultural and aesthetic transformations could be found in the literary experiments conducted by classical Russian writers and by their predecessors, the authors of English Gothic novel. Reading fiction in the wider context of movies, computer games, I analyze the appeal of the Gothic and horror genre, violence and monsters, particularly among young audiences.
To investigate this global trend in contemporary culture, I develop the concept of Gothic aesthetic, which plays important role in my research on the interconnection between post-Soviet historical memory and a specific version of Putin’s neo-medievalism. In Russia, Gothic aesthetic underlies a new social order under Putin’s regime, Gothic society, that combines quasi-medieval social practices and imaginative structures influenced by the distorted memory of Stalinism. In Gothic Society: Morphology of A Nightmare, and the expanded French version, Portrait critique de la Russie, I explore how the Gothic tradition has come into play in post-Soviet culture, politics, and society under Putin.