From geopolitics and regional identity to geopoetics and self-identification – a trajectory of conceptualization of Central Europe?

Abstract

The article problematizes the discourse on Central Europe following a trajectory from the twentieth-century geopolitics and region-building projects founded on identity politics to the contemporary geopoetics and literary self-identifications shaped in relation to place and time. Emphasis is put on the second geopoetic, literary pole which is nourished by negative categories and is composed of particular articulations of being a Central European shaped in time of historical discontinuities and crises. Methodologically the paper is framed by the interdisciplinary sensory studies. The article addresses several contemporary writers’ self-identifications (Andrzej Stasiuk, Robert Makłowicz, Drago Jančar) founded on “autobiographical sites” which give insight into shared articulations of certain elements of Central European myth (problematic identity, spatial in-betweenness and feeling of transience, idealized Habsburg Monarchy).  Furthermore, the instances of reconfiguration of this myth are presented by paying attention to the role of somatic experience shaping sensuous topographies of Central Europe which reconfigure the region's imagined spatial coordinates by replacing the horizontal dichotomy of the desired western culture and rejected eastern politics with the vertical paradigm of southern and northern vectors. Has Central Europe present in contemporary twenty-first century literary representations replaced the twentieth-century Cold-War West-East geopolitical in-betweenness with the geopoetic meridian points of reference?