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Bryla, Martyna Marika 2024-09-30T11:12:12Z 2024-09-30T11:12:12Z 2017 Bryla, Martyna Marika "Charting the Liminal Geographies of Eastern Europe in Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Stories". Walton, D., Suárez, J., A. (2017). Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space. Oxford, United Kingdom: Peter Lang Verlag. Retrieved Sep 30, 2024, from 10.3726/b11229 https://hdl.handle.net/10630/34027 https://www.peterlang.com/document/1055660 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. eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Oates, Joyce Carol - Crítica e interpretación Charting the Liminal Geographies of Eastern Europe in Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Stories. book part