Menk: Literature of Exile in Post-WWI Paris

With Menk, Dr. Talar Chahinian illuminates a largely forgotten chapter in the annals of Western Armenian literature. The name refers to a group of young writers, survivors of the Armenian Genocide, who formed a literary collective in late-1920s Paris. Through their writings and the launch of their journal, Menk cultivated a new kind of diasporic writing that pushed against the Western Armenian literary tradition that preceded them. While the group’s literary output garnered a wide readership at the time, much of their work has been since forgotten. Dr. Chahinian sheds light on the platform that the Menk writers tried to cultivate and why much of their work remains inaccessible to us today.

Originally published June 2021.

About the speaker

Talar Chahinian

Dr. Talar Chahinian holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA and lectures in the Program for Armenian Studies at UC Irvine, where she is also a Research Associate in the Department of Comparative Literature. She is the co-editor of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies.

Talar Chahinian