Charting the Liminal Geographies of Eastern Europe in Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Stories.

Abstract

Framed by imagology and geocriticism, this chapter analyses American imaginative geographies of the European East in Joyce Carol Oates’s short stories (1984).1 I argue that Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest turn into liminal sites of danger and possibility for Oates’s American characters, incarnating both the escapist quality of travel beyond the ordinary and the darker side which the removal from one’s ‘comfort zone’ may entail. Thus, the experience of crossing the Iron Curtain and getting to know the Eastern other triggers self-discovery, confirming imagology’s premise that the way we map alterity tends to tell us more about ourselves than about others. In addition to unveiling the complex dynamics between selfhood and otherness, these stories also attest to the position which Eastern Europe occupied in the American Cold-War imaginary. Simultaneously, despite being embedded in a specific socio-historical moment, Eastern Europe mapped by Oates functions as a symbol which goes beyond the Cold-War context.