Transatlantic Central Europe
Subtitle: contesting geography and redefining culture beyond the nation
By: Jessie Labov
Publisher: Central European University Press
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Budapest
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9786155053290; 9786155053146
Subjects: Cross currents; Political culture; Social networks; Mass media; Transnationalism; Periodicals; Relations; History
Description: "The proposed book takes one phenomenon, the reinvention of the idea of Central Europe in the mid-1980s, and demonstrates how its proponents developed a transnational set of practices connecting political-cultural journals with other media, disseminating this idea simultaneously in East and West. I use a range of new approaches and methodologies, including visualization of text corpora and mapping techniques, in order to reposition the political-cultural journal as one central node of a much larger cultural system. There is more at stake here than simply documenting the intellectual history of dissidents from this region in the late 1970s and 1980s, or the cultural politics that developed in their wake. By unearthing the legacy of Cold War-era border-crossing networks in the post-89 period, I show how the use of transnational, web-based media alongside of radio and print media follows the logic and practice of an earlier, 'dissident' generation of writers. Anyone who has followed the chain of electoral and economic challenges that the former satellite countries have faced over the last twenty years might ask what has happened to the liberal humanist philosophy that the term 'Central Europe' once evoked? This book follows its trajectories forward into the present day, reading both its material and intellectual traces in the post-socialist landscape"--Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Movements of texts across borders; title: Part One. Cross Currents and its transatlantic Central European imaginary; title: The political-cultural journal : the case of Cross Currents; title: The debate over Central Europe from Jews to Yugoslavia; title: Part Two. Further essays in contesting geography and redefining culture; title: Borders, editors, and readers in motion; title: Transmedial work-arounds after 1989; title: Conclusion: Redefining transatlantic Central Europe today.