ACLA 2009 Call for Papers: East Central Europe and the Western Other

[Edyta Bojanowska]

*Dear Seelangers,

Please consider joining the following seminar (see below) at the 
upcoming ACLA conference.  The organizers are open to a variety of 
approaches.  The deadline is November 1.  Please post your paper 
proposals via the the conference website, selecting the name of this 
panel from the drop-down menu.  Thank you,

Edyta Bojanowska

*****************************************
ACLA, Cambridge, MA, 26-29 March 2009:*
** 
/On the Fringes of the Center: East-Central Europe and the Western Other/
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.

-- 

Edyta Bojanowska
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Germanic, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures
Dept. of Comparative Literature
Rutgers University
195 College Ave, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
phone: (732) 932-7201
fax: (732) 932-1111
http://german.rutgers.edu/faculty/profiles/bojanowska.htm


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