Call for Papers: ACLA panel, Imaginaries of Mitteleuropa/Central Europe

[Irina Denischenko]

Dear SEELANGS members,

We invite you to submit abstracts to our ACLA panel on "Imaginaries of
Mitteleuropa / Central Europe between the Slavic East and the German West."
The annual American Comparative Literature Association meeting will take
place at NYU on March 20-23, 2014. Abstracts may be submitted through the
ACLA portal (see below) until November 15.  If you have any questions,
please feel free to contact us. Thanks!

Irina Denischenko (imd2110 at columbia.edu)
Ph.D. candidate, Columbia University

Yvonne Zivkovic (yz2267 at columbia.edu)
Ph.D. candidate, Columbia University

*Imaginaries of “Mitteleuropa/Central Europe” between the Slavic East and
the German West*

ACLA: American Comparative Literature Association

Annual Meeting

March 20-23, 2014, New York University

*Description:*

This panel aims to examine the spatial imaginaries propelled by the
discourse of “Central Europe,” from the early 20th century onwards. In
particular, it interrogates the tension between the German notion of
“Mitteleuropa” and its wide influence in the Slavic and Eastern European
sphere. Rather than just a vague geographical location, the idea of
“Central Europe” has referred to a culturally complex, hybrid space which
has been appropriated for different political and poetical agendas in the
course of the last century: German and Austrian politicians have used it
for colonialist mappings during both world wars, Austrian-Jewish writers
imagined it as the last humanist utopia against fascism in the 1940s, and
Eastern European dissidents have invoked the subversive aspects of its
Austro-Hungarian legacy counter oppressive Soviet rule. Two major
disruptions of the Central European map have shaped the discourse until
this day: the extermination of Central European Jews during the Second
World War and the radical division of the continent following it. We are
interested how the geopolitical meets the geopoetical when dealing with
questions of trauma, displacement, cultural memory, ideology, and identity
in the literature of this multilayered region.

*Possible topics:*

- Central Europe between utopia and nostalgia

- Imperialist and fascist appropriations of Europe

- Central European spaces of loss and atrocity

- Central Europe after 1989 – new and old divisions between east, west and
center

- Central European cities as repositories of memory

- Central Europe as postmodern Third Space

*You can submit your abstract here:*

http://www.acla.org/submit/

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