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Inspired by the well-established trope of Eastern Europe's in-betweenness, this article uses the notion of liminality to explore the images of Eastern Europe during the Cold War in the works of three American authors: John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth. Not only do these works map Eastern Europe as liminal in the imagological sense of the term, that is, as oscillating between competing narratives of otherness and familiarity; empathy and hostility; the East and the West, but also the very experience of venturing behind the Iron Curtain is charged with potentiality: the Eastern-European cityscape becomes the contact zone between cultures and the locus of self-discovery for the American characters. The resultant imaginative geography is at once contemporary and allochronic; political and personal, as it reiterates the Cold War balance of power while at the same time recycling existing representations of the area and reflecting the authors' sensibilities. ; Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málaga.

Poles are one of the largest non-UK born ethnic groups in all countries and most regions of the United Kingdom. Since Poland's accession to the European Union in May 2004, thousands of Poles have migrated to the UK, hoping for better professional opportunities and higher standards of living. It was thus only a matter of time before Poles started to put their experience of migration on paper. One example is A.M. Bakalar, whose literary debut,Madame Mephisto(2012), was promoted as the voice of the new wave of Polish migration and the first novel to be written in English by a Polish female author since Poland joined the EU in 2004. This article centres on Bakalar's protagonist, a thirty-year-old Pole in London, with the aim of revealing how cultural myths and beliefs feed into the process of identity formation and what it takes for the experience of migration to go awry. By exploring Magda's problematic relationship with her home country, represented as oppressive and insular, this article inquiries into the nature of contemporary migrant experience and the role which national identity plays in the process of cultural adjustment. ; Los polacos son una de las minorías más numerosas dentro del Reino Unido. Desde la adhesión de Polonia a la Unión Europea en mayo de 2004, miles de polacos han emigrado al Reino Unido con la esperanza de mejorar sus oportunidades profesionales y su nivel de vida. Así pues, era sólo cuestión de tiempo que empezaran a plasmar en papel su experiencia sobre la migración. Un ejemplo de ello, es A.M. Bakalar, cuyo debut, Madame Mephisto (2012), fue promocionado como la voz de la nueva ola de la migración polaca y la primera novela escrita en inglés por una autora polaca desde que Polonia se unió a la UE en 2004. Este artículo se centra en la protagonista de la novela, una polaca de treinta años en Londres, con el objetivo de revelar cómo los mitos y creencias culturales influyen en el proceso de formación de la identidad migrante y en cómo inciden en que la experiencia de migración sea problemática. Al explorar la dificultosa relación entre Magda y su país de origen, representado como opresivo e intransigente, este artículo indaga en la naturaleza de la experiencia migratoria contemporánea y el papel que juega la identidad nacional en el proceso de ajuste cultural.

John Updike's short stories about Henry Bech's diplomatic adventures in the European East have been analysed mainly in the context of the Cold-War balance of power and Updike's ambivalent attitude to communist Russia. While the hard-boiled politics constitute the backdrop of Bech's cultural mission, the three stories which I discuss in this essay entertain tensions between the official and the personal, which in turn shape the protagonist's representations of Eastern European others. Accordingly, by combining imagology with elements of geocriticism and affect studies, this essay explores how cultural patterns of perceiving alterity are intertwined with emotions to produce Bech's emotional geographies of the European East, which in mapping the other reflect back on and consolidate Bech's American self. ; Los relatos cortos de John Updike sobre las aventuras diplomáticas del escritor Henry Bech en el Este de Europa han sido estudiados principalmente en el contexto de la Guerra Fría y de la ambivalente actitud de Updike hacia la Rusia comunista. Mientras que la dura política constituye el telón de fondo de la misión cultural de Bech, en los tres relatos analizados existen tensiones entre lo oficial y lo personal que a su vez nutren la imagen del otro. Así pues, en este ensayo se combina la imagología con elementos de geocrítica y los estudios del afecto, para explorar cómo las percepciones culturales se entrelazan con las emociones, produciendo las geografías emocionales del Este Europeo, que, al trazar la imagen del otro, reflejan y consolidan la identidad norteamericana de Henry Bech. ; Universidad de Málaga ; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación FFI2017-86417-P

Poland's accession to the European Union in 2004 is commonly regarded as a watershed in the history of Polish emigration. The massive inflow of Poles to the EU countries, most notably the United Kingdom, has been amply analysed from the perspective of sociology, economics, and psychology. Simultaneously, the experience of migration and the changes it brings about has attracted the attention of those Polish-born authors who themselves inhabit transnational European spaces, and whose works, featuring migrant characters, are now analysed from different critical perspectives: postcolonial/postcommunist, imagological, and feminist, to name but a few. In this paper, I will focus on three such authors who fictionalise migration in their works while at the same time partaking in the cultural in-betweenness that transnational movement entails: Grażyna Plebanek, A.M. Bakalar, and Agnieszka Dale. My proposition is that by portraying contemporary (Polish) migrants, their works reveal various reconfigurations inherent in the experience of leaving one's homeland for the host country, with its idiosyncratic, culture-specific features and more universal patterns of integration, or lack thereof. In doing so, these works also reflect upon contemporary Europe and the way in which selfhood and otherness are (mis)represented and enacted in a variety of settings, ranging from the micro context of an individual, through romantic and family relationships, transnational workplace, and even the dystopian post-human spaces of the Europe of the future. As they map the experience of migration in the 21st century, these works dramatize tensions within contemporary European spaces, where one's gender, ethnicity, and/or provenance affect inter-human relations, challenging and disrupting the official European narrative of "united in diversity." ; Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The purpose of this dissertation is to study literary representations of Eastern Europe in the works of celebrated and less-known American authors, who visited and narrated the region between the mid-1960s and early 2000s. The main critical body focuses on Eastern Europe before 1989 and encompasses three major voices of American literature: John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, and Philip Roth. However, in the last chapter I also explore American literary perceptions of the area following the collapse of communism. Importantly, the term "Eastern Europe" as used in this dissertation is charged with significance. I approach it not only as a space on the map or the geopolitical construct which emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War, but rather as a conceptual category and a repository of meanings built out of fact and fantasy: specific historical, political and cultural realities interlaced with subjective worldviews, preconceptions, and mental images. The critical framework of this dissertation is twofold. I reach for the concept of liminality to elucidate the indeterminacy and malleability which lies at the heart of the object of study—the idea, image, and experience of Eastern Europe. Bearing in mind the nature of the works under analysis, all of which were inspired by actual visits behind the Iron Curtain, I propose to interpret these transatlantic literary journeys in terms of generative experience, where Eastern Europe is mapped as a liminal space of possibility; a contact zone between cultures and, potentially, the locus of self-discovery and individual transformation. If liminality is the metaphor or a lens that I employ in order to account for the nature of the analyzed works and the complex terrain they map, imagology, whose purpose is to study the processes of constructing selfhood and otherness in literature, provides me with the method and the critical vocabulary for analyzing selected literary representations. The dissertation is divided into six chapters, the last of which serves as coda to the ...

Poles are one of the three largest non-UK born ethnic groups in all countries and most regions of the United Kingdom. Since Poland's accession to the European Union in May 2004, thousands of Poles have come to the UK in search of better job prospects and higher standards of living. For many of them London has been the ultimate destination, promising not only a booming job market but also embodying "a modern, transcultural metropolis" (Plesske and Rostek 1). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Polish migrant experience in the UK and London in particular has found its way into fiction. One example is A.M. Bakalar's debut novel Madame Mephisto (2012), advertised as the voice of the new wave of Polish immigration and the first novel to be written in English by a Polish female author since Poland joined the EU in 2004. This paper focuses on the novel's protagonist, a thirty-year-old Pole named Magda, and the way she constructs her immigrant identity through defying her Polishness and taking the opportunities London offers to an extreme degree. By becoming a ruthless cannabis dealer, Magda asserts her independence and challenges the stereotype of a docile Polish female for whom the family and religion are of utmost importance. At the same time, she perpetuates other stereotypes related to gender, ethnicity and, in a broader perspective, the conceptual categories of East and West. In contrast to more traditional migrant fiction, it is the protagonist's homeland rather than the British "other" that seems to be the source of Magda's emotional malaise. By analyzing the novel as well as several interviews with the author and the book's reception both in Poland and in the UK, this paper inquiries into the nature of contemporary migrant experience as negotiated through fiction. It also poses questions about what it means to integrate and whether severing ties with one's native culture is necessary to achieve it. ; Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech.

In the present paper, the concept of liminality is applied to study the portrayal and significance of the post-war Eastern Europe, and Czechoslovakia in particular, in the life and fiction of one of the best contemporary American authors, Philip Roth. Liminality is an anthropological concept that refers to the transitional phase of a rite of passage. It is characterized by "ambiguity and paradox, a confusion of all customary categories" (Turner 97). At the same time, this apparent lack of structure has transformative and creative properties, and may bring about novel configurations and possibilities. The concept has gained well-deserved popularity beyond anthropology proper. Among others, it has been applied to explore theatre and literature. More recently, scholars in political and social studies have recognized its potential for studying large-scale social and political movements and transformations. Both communism and post-communism have been analysed from the perspective of liminality. Furthermore, some scholars conceptualized the condition of post-war Eastern Europe as liminal. Given liminality's potential for illuminating the two major strands of this paper: literature and politics, I analyze the communist Prague in Philip Roth's The Prague Orgy (1985) as a liminal space that forces the protagonist, a successful American novelist Nathan Zuckerman, to face and revise his own preconceptions of the place and himself. By sending Zuckerman behind the Iron Curtain and confronting him with the native authors whose works have been banned by the regime, Roth poses a more universal question about the nature of literature and the function of writer. Additionally, I resort to Philip Roth's biography to explore the writer's personal connection with "the Other Europe." I am especially interested in the author's travels to Czechoslovakia between 1972 and 1977, and the way they affected his personal and creative life. As this paper attempts to demonstrate, Roth's and Zuckerman's Czechoslovak experience is liminal in ...

This paper approaches a selection of Joyce Carol Oates' short stories about the post-war Eastern Europe from the perspective of liminality. In the stories, Oates takes her readers for a tour of a world that no longer exists, exploring, as the title of the collection suggests, the Last Days (1984) of Eastern Europe in the grip of communism—the world divided by history and politics, where the personal has become enslaved by the political. In anthropology, the adjective "liminal" refers to the middle stage in a tripartite structure of rite of passage developed by a French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep. Those passing through a liminal phase are separated from the well-known and familiar and divested of their habitual thinking, feeling and acting. Meanwhile, they are "alternately forced or encouraged to think about their society, their cosmos, and the powers that generate and sustain them" (Turner 105). Therefore, liminality implies a deep transformation of the subject who is supposed to emerge from the rite not only equipped with fresh knowledge but also as a new being. In recent years, the concept has proved to offer a valuable tool for studying literature in terms of both form and content. In this paper, I propose to read Oates' protagonists' encounters with Eastern Europe as liminal in nature. I suggest that by travelling behind the Iron Curtain the Americans become immersed in a kind of rite of passage which makes them, at least for a while, forgo the world as they know it and enter a liminal phase charged both with dangers and possibilities. In consequence, the European capitals featured in the stories, Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest, become sites of personal refection, inner conflict, and even physical and mental transformation. At the same time, Oates gives her readers a taste of what life was like behind the Iron Curtain, juxtaposing the Eastern and the Western in a poignant, if at times stereotypical manner. In more general terms, this paper hopes to demonstrate that liminality provides a valid framework to ...