Transatlantic Encounters: Representations of East Central Europe after
Communism in Literature and the Media

We are searching submissions for a book project tentatively entitled
"Transatlantic Encounters: Representations of East Central Europe after
Communism in Literature and the Media." This edited collection of articles
would like to consider the literary and media productions that reflect and
analyze the consequences of the explosive interaction between the
reminenscens of communist ideological mindset and the demands of the
incipient capitalist economy in former communist European countries from a
double perspective: American and East Central European.

Essays should address the concerns of the volume as outlined below:
Our project started from the premise that former East Central European
cultures are confronted with emerging and still uncharted social and
political phenomena, which now, more than ever are in need of a pertinent
idiom and relevant theoretical configurations to translate them to the
rest of the world.

As such our collection seeks to analyze the fictional and documentary
literature and films that focus on the post-1989 transatlantic encounters
of both émigrés and American observers with a free Eastern Europe.
Conversely, we would like to survey the impact of the interactions between
the East Central European and the United States cultural model, and the
reactions of East Central Europeans to their own emerging societal
paradigm in the wake of a rather abrupt transition to a golbalized market
economy.

This book aims to analyze and conceptualize the theoretical and historical
context of the post-1989 functions of literary and media discourses within
the new order of former Eastern European societies, whose dynamic is
shaped by the demands of democratic capitalism, the downfalls of latent
third-world corruption, and the self-image emerging from a belated
postcolonial awakening.

As transatlantic political, economic, scholarly, and artistic interactions
and encounters have played a crucial role in shaping the emergent image of
ex-communist Europe, but also in fortifying some lasting stereotypes, we
are mostly interested in submissions that survey literary works and films
capturing the results of such encounters.

At this point, the volume is tentatively structured on the following
chapters:
•Remaining relevant after Communism: The New Relationship between
Literature, the Media, and Society
• American Émigrés Perceptions of Eastern Europe Before and After 1989
• Second Generation Transatlantic Encounters
• Eastern Europe Through the American Gaze
• Self Perceptions of Eastern Europe after 1989.

We would like our contributors to consider theoretical and contextual
readings of East Central European phenomena along current theories of the
sublatern, postcolonialism, alternative modernities, and globalization.
Also we encourage contributions from all former communist countries, in
the hope that such an approach would do justice to the complex cultural
and social landscape that is former Eastern europe today.

Please submit 500-word abstracts or 20 double-spaced page papers to
Letitia Guran and Anca L. Holden at letitia.guran_at_richmond.edu;
anca_at_uga.edu by March 1, 2007.

Letitia Guran, Ph.D.
English Department
418 Ryland Hall
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA, 23173

phone:(804)287-6432

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Received on Fri Jan 19 2007 - 20:25:05 EST