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NATIONAL LITERATURES AND DIASPORAS: TOWARDS A POLYCENTRIC CONCEPT OF CULTURE (Narodne literatury a diaspory: k polycentrickemu pojmu kultury)

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Cornis-Pope M.

World Literature Studies

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2010

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vol. 2 (19)

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issue 1

10-25

EN

The present article argues that the expansive movements of creativity through exile, transplantation, and participation in trans-national projects have played a defining role in East - Central European literature. The literary cultures of this area have often used their diasporic expansions to reaffirm but also problematise their national distinctiveness. The interplay between national and diasporic, local and global, has called into question any organic or totalizing concept of East - Central European literary and cultural evolution. The contours of this cultural region have remained variable, open to alternative mappings. Exiled writers play a significant role in this continuous redefinition. The cultural projects pursued by them were often hybrid, allowing for trans-national agendas, as in the case of Emil Cioran, Witold Gombrowicz, Milan Kundera, Imre Kertesz, and others who followed a trajectory of the cultural detours and repositioning. The problematisation of national and ethnic/local identity has gone even further in the work of 'hybrid' minority writers, especially when confronted with the drama of exile and uprooting. Consider the case of the recent Nobel-prize winner, Herta Muller. Muller's fiction, published after her emigration to Germany, represents the difficulties of life under both totalitarianism and the exilic condition, emphasizing the conflicting facets of her identity. Her work tries to reclaim a more inclusive, borderless notion of East - Central Europe, cutting across former Cold War divisions. While the late nineteenth-century East - Central European exiles sought a redeeming narrative that could reconnect their present to a mythic past, the Avant-garde writers of the early twentieth century broke radically with the past, deconstructing both Eastern and Western traditions. In addition to encouraging contributions from various cultural 'peripheries' (Russian formalism, Czech structuralism, Romanian Dadaism, Hungarian and Serbian futurism), the historical Avant-garde managed to redefine the centres of Western cultural influence, bringing Europe closer to the idea of a polycentric culture. The collaboration between transplanted and native writers is equally important in post-1989 East - Central Europe, as the literary cultures of this area are submitted to a process of critical re-examination and cross-cultural reconfiguration.

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WRITING THE HISTORY OF THE EAST-CENTRAL EUROPEAN LITERARY CULTURES: A RETROSPECT (Pisanie Dejin literarnych kultur vychodo-strednej Europy: Retrospektiva.)

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Cornis-Pope M.

World Literature Studies

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2010

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vol. 2 (19)

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issue 4

39-48

EN

The article recounts the experience from the cooperation with Professor John Neubauer on the collective work History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, which was produced by more than a hundred contributors from various countries. The work's aim is to map the 'literary ethnographies' of East-Central Europe, a region that at its best has functioned as a 'transitional, transmittory and liminal' area between variously positioned cultures and influences. This multivolume work was sponsored by ICLA and published by John Benjamins Press in 2004-2010. The project was inspired by the comparative-intercultural approach to the literary history outlined in Mario J. Valdes and Linda Hutcheon's position paper in 1995 and applied to the sister project on Latin American Literatures. Building on the theoretical suggestions offered by them, we decided to organize our history around five kinds of 'nodes'-temporal, generic, topographic, institutional, and figural-conceived by us and our contributors as points of contact or interfaces at which various literatures, genres, and historical moments come together, transcending national definitions. The nodal approach has offered us a more flexible model for the discussion of literature in a continually shifting geo-political and cultural environment such as that of the East-Central Europe. The work undertaken in the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe will, hopefully, foreground alternative ways of identity making in the area, which emphasize local, regional and trans-national possibilities.

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URBAN CARTOGRAPHIES IN THE POST-COLD WAR ERA: POSTMODERN CHALLENGES TO ETHNOCENTRIC AND GLOBALIST MAPPINGS

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Cornis-Pope M.

World Literature Studies

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2009

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vol. 1(18)

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issue 1

14-27

EN

The post-Cold war period has freed our topographic imagination of traditional ideological polarizations, but has often replaced these imperialistic mappings with cartographies of a nationalistic or ethnocentric kind that promote resentful cultural division. Much of this new ethnic and nationalist fundamentalism has emerged in direct reaction to the pressure of the First World's globalizing ideologies. The new tensions between global interdependency and ethnocentric separatism, First-World centres and Third-World peripheries, indicate a state of continued crisis at the level of the ideological frameworks within which cultural exchanges unfold. Neither a globalist notion of multiculturalism, nor a defensive localism is a proper approach to the issue of otherness. The alternative is the naive celebration of 'hybridity' and 'national centrism' (Homi Bhabha, Edward Soja and the others). The author asserts that we need 'narratives of relation positionality' (Susan Stanford Friedman) that will challenge traditional separations between self and other, western and non-western, male and female, global and local. The paper shows on examples from present American and Central Europe literature, that postmodernism is able to afford this 'narratives of relation positionality'.

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3 World Literature Studies

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3 Cornis-Pope M.

NATIONAL LITERATURES AND DIASPORAS: TOWARDS A POLYCENTRIC CONCEPT OF CULTURE (Narodne literatury a diaspory: k polycentrickemu pojmu kultury)

WRITING THE HISTORY OF THE EAST-CENTRAL EUROPEAN LITERARY CULTURES: A RETROSPECT (Pisanie Dejin literarnych kultur vychodo-strednej Europy: Retrospektiva.)

URBAN CARTOGRAPHIES IN THE POST-COLD WAR ERA: POSTMODERN CHALLENGES TO ETHNOCENTRIC AND GLOBALIST MAPPINGS