Elitza Ranova
Curriculum Vitae
Current Project
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My research is located at the crossroads of the study of visual
culture, media and social structure. It investigates the significance
of aesthetics in the project of a new segment of post-socialist
culture producers to “enlighten” Bulgarians and
to bring Bulgarian artistic and pop culture production up
to the level of imagined “European standards.”
The focus of the study is on a new generation of artists,
photographers, actors and writers in Sofia, Bulgaria, who
came of age in the 1990s and who function as an engine for
change and as a cultural avant-garde. Considering the ambitions
of this social segment to replace the established actors and
modes of work inherited from socialism, the project examines
cultural change after socialism’s end.
The dissertation is concerned with two main sets of issues:
aesthetic and social. I investigate how the new generation
of culture producers employs emulation and appropriation of
foreign and specifically British models in a process of postmodern
innovation. The text offers a detailed empirical analysis
of the dialogical tensions that shape the work of the new
culture producers, engaging such themes as the apprehension
about Bulgaria’s backwardness and the imagined superiority
of the “West.” Aesthetics of provocation and irony
play a defining role both in the creative work and in the
lifestyle preferences of these culture producers. Because
this social segment situates itself as an “alternative”
or an “underground” to an imagined Bulgarian mainstream,
it provides an opportunity to study how the idea of “Europe”
is employed in the production of innovative and subversive
lifestyles.
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