O genocídio armênio e seus reflexos na literatura

Abstract

The history of Armenia in the 20th century is marked by a tragedy: the genocide of approximately 1,500.000 inhabitants of Turkish Armenia by the Ottoman Empire. The goal of this paper is to analyze two main consequences of the Armenian genocide in Armenian literature, namely, the transition from modern (1850-1915) to contemporary literature (1915-), and the formation of Armenian contemporary literature in Diaspora. While Armenian modern literature is largely characterized by militant engagement, aiming to instruct the popular masses so that they could fight for political and social justice and forindependence, Armenian contemporary literature produced in Diaspora deals mainly with questions concerning cultural identity of Armenian descendants that were born in Diaspora. We exemplify these trends with excerpts from texts written by two modern authors (Raffi and Daniel Varujan) and two contemporary ones (William Saroyan and Michael J. Arlen).