CENTRAL EUROPE IN LITERARY STUDIES

The paper offers a delineation of Central Europe from the viewpoint of literary studies. Central Europe as a cultural and geographic space or a crossroad between East and West is characterized by the changing position of unstable centres and peripheries, and by a fusion of ethnic groups, cultures and religions. The territorial principle of mutual “contacts” led to an intense communication and exchange of literary values, to understanding, but also to encounters of artistic traditions and poetics, norms and conventions. The metonymic motivation of this communication, which results rather from “neighbouring” contacts than from the genetic relation among the languages, gave rise not only to the process of inter-culturality but also postulated the myth of cultural unity. While minimalist concepts work with binary oppositions (we and them, ours and theirs, centre and periphery, etc.), which characterize this space as a specific region of small Slavonic and non-Slavonic nations between Germany and Russia, the maximalist concepts sees Central Europe mostly from the axiological point of view as a set of historically developed ideas related to the tradition of Latin Christianity. From the viewpoint of literary studies, the question is whether one observes its ideologemes on the level of genre, poetics and style, i.e. in the very literary structures. Some literary scholar contend that we can decipher the Central Europeanisms of the inter-poeticity of artefacts (as certain timeless cultural models and constants) in the Central European variant of the grotesque, the irony, the satire, the cabaret or the post-modern prose. The paper also summarizes the views of literary theorists on the phenomenon of Central Europe.