Imagined Geographies

In 1984 Czech writer Milan Kundera published his essay 'The Tragedy of Central Europe' in The New York Review of Books, which established the framework for disputes about the space ‘between East and West’ for the following 30 years. Even today, the echo of those debates is still audible in spatial narratives. Discussing the way in which literary figures are positioned within new hierarchies such as gender, class, or ethnicity, this volume shows how the space of the imagined Central Europe has been de- and reconstructed. Special attention is paid to the role of the past in shaping contemporary spatial discourse.

Magdalena Baran-Szo?tys is a Ph.D. candidate at the Doctoral Program ‘Austrian Galicia and its Multicultural Heritage’ at the University of Vienna. She holds an MA in Germanic Studies and an MA in Slavic Studies. She was a tutor in German Language and Literature at the University of Sydney and a visiting scholar at the Institute of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University, University of Wroc?aw, and at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. Monika Glosowitz is a teaching and research assistant at the Department of Comparative Literature of the University of Silesia. She holds PhDs from the University of Silesia and the University of Oviedo. She graduated from the Interdepartmental Individual Studies in Humanities of the University of Silesia and also holds an MA from Utrecht University and the University of Granada. She works as associated editor of the journals artPapier, Opcje, and Polish-Canadian Comparative Studies. Aleksandra Konarzewska is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Tübingen. She studied philosophy, history, religious studies, and Slavic literature at the University of Warsaw, Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Free University Berlin, and Yale University. At Yale, she was a tutor in Eastern European History and Intellectual History.

„What is Central Europe? The discursive field that defines, reflects upon and depicts Central Europe, this collection of essays argues, is literature. Already in the 1980s, Milan Kundera argued that a political accident had moved countries which considered themselves the cultural center of Europe, Poland, the Czech Republic, or even Ukraine, into a political East, the Eastern bloc. The Center of Europe disappeared, and only after the fall of the Berlin Wall it started to reappear, mostly in literary and essayistic writing. The articles in this volume look closely at this writing and show how post-socialist literature moves back in time in order to revive a cultural European center. Nostalgic memories and mythic reveries evoke an image of Central Europe from a time before the world was divided into East and West."—Professor Schamma Schahadat, Institute of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Tübingen

"[…] what is remarkable about Imagined Geographies: Central European Spatial Narratives between 1984 and 2014 is the way its authors combine the theories of acknowledged scholars and thinkers such as Edward Said (1978), Benedict Anderson (1983) and Edward Soja (1996) with the ideas of brilliant writers and litterateurs like Milan Kundera or Andrzej Stasiuk. It is broadly known that geography is an interdisciplinary field of science but geopoetics in the border zone of geography and literature has been a less known subdiscipline up until today. With the publishing of Imagined Geographies not only the Central Europe debate gets enriched with new theories, ideas, and information, but the readers (both academic and non-academic) can discover a new domain of the discourse – the spatial narratives constructed by literature."—Bálint Kronstein, Hungarian Geographical Bulletin 69 2020 (4)