Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: It is easy to get lost in the maze of interpretations related to the concept of Central Europe, frequently "elusive" (Bugge 15) and contradictory."Central Europe" is not semantically neutral in its historical, political, ethnic, and cultural connotations, 1 and each of the applications of this term has a very specific goal, reflecting, in turn, the aspirations, desires, hopes, dreams, or nostalgia of its interpreter.Only the authority of the interpreter determines its attraction for the rest of the world.Milan Kundera, one of the best known literary figures to be part of the discussion about Central Europe, has been extraordinarily successful in bringing the topic to the fore. 2 He has obstinately defended the region's political identity and cultural uniqueness, as well as its West European connectedness in his essays, polemics, and novels, especially from the 1980s.Yet, in recent years, Kundera seems to have re-thought his concept of Central Europe based, contrary to expectation, not as much on the new post-1989 realities as on his own artistic goals, which have expanded beyond the borders of Europe.His novel L'ignorance (2000) 3 attests to this re-evaluation.It offers a new perspective on the region, no longer privileging its central location, in other words, redefining its state of in-betweeness as that of geographic, cultural, and linguistic fluidity.To trace Kundera's development of his concept of Central Europe is to reimagine the once enclosed territory, but also to reinvent the adventure that lies ahead of the European novel.The latter point is especially important to Kundera the novelist, in view of his ambition of moving onto to the world stage.In November 1983, the Brno native, once an influential Prague intellectual and writer, and later a world-famous Parisian émigré, published
Author: Hana Pichova
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3033816130