Transatlantic Central Europe ― Contesting Geography and Redefining Culture Beyond the Nation

"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, disseminatingthis 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 thepresent day, reading both its material and intellectual traces in the post-socialist landscape"--Provided by publisher.