Detailed Page Ostrovskaya

From 2011-2015, I studied English and Romance studies at Heinrich-Heine University Dusseldorf. In 2018, I got my MA degree in Comparative Studies in English and American Language, Literature and Culture at HHU and started working as a research assistant at the Department of Modern English Literature. I am currently pursuing a PhD-project with the preliminary title “Narrative Scenography in Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction”.

My research interests include:

• British literature of the twentieth century, especially Modernist literature
• Short story as a genre
• Literary theories of creativity, ecology of literary practices
• Intertextuality and metafiction
• Literary animal studies 

My PhD project investigates scenes and scenography in Virginia Woolf’s short fiction. Scenes are constitutive for Woolf’s fiction: the author found scene receiving “the origin of [her] writing impulse” and scene making her “natural way of marking the past” (A Sketch of the Past 142). I explore narrative scenes as textual units identifiable on the diegetic level, as well as the larger concept of writing scene that goes beyond the confines of a particular work of fiction.

My project positions fiction-making as an ongoing process of transformation and becoming. In this process, the boundaries between individual texts, between fictional and non-fictional works, between the author and her creation become blurred. My aim is to generate perspectives on the ontology of literature and on literature as a mode of being. At the same time, I am aiming for a new methodology for analyzing narrative fiction.

I teach BA courses on Modernist and contemporary literature, covering a wide range of topics, from Modernist writing as a mode of being to intertextual re-writings and adaptation. I also teach courses on literary animal studies, which explore metaphorical and literal representations of animals in fiction.

“Reframing the Nonhuman: Grievability and the Value of Life in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go” (under peer-review)