American Comparative Literature Association
On the Fringes of the Center:
East-Central Europe and the Western Other
Cambridge, MA
26-29 March 2009
http://www.acla.org/acla2009/?p=165

Seminar Organizer: Joshua P Beall, Rutgers U, Monica Filimon, Rutgers U

The post-1945 Cold War grouping of Communist-bloc countries under the banner of "Eastern" Europe often obscures the fact that the region's cultures and literatures were often Western in orientation. This panel examines the manner in which the East-Central European imaginary created and managed its own space of the (Western) Other. We are hoping for a dialogue about how these different cultures adapted, reproduced, subverted, or redefined the West and reinvented themselves in the process. To what extent have the conventions of different literary or filmic genres been subverted in East-Central Europe? How has capitalism as a global (Western) "language" been domesticated in this part of Europe? How have the different countries in East-Central Europe fashioned an image of themselves, of each other, and of the West from a geographically central yet politically marginal position? How did the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire affect the different national identities forged within its former borders? How did Communism influence the image of the West in the minds of the ordinary Eastern Europeans?

How has the fall of Communism influenced affective relationships with the West?

We welcome papers on both literature and cinema from East-Central Europe that focus on the aesthetic journey of the West through the local imaginary in relation to issues such as nation and nationality, gender, psychoanalysis, politics, and even economics.