Imagined Geographies

Magdalena Baran-Szoltys 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 Wroclaw, 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.

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.