Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Zaborowska, Magdalena Justyna

Titel

The alien within: The East European as a state of mind and body in modern American culture

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

1992

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This study examines literary and cultural exchanges between America and East Europe from the end of the nineteenth century till the present moment. It explores how the dialogue between these two cultures is reflected in the works of lesser-known immigrant and expatriate women writers from Poland and Russia--from Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, and Elizabeth Stern, through Maria Kuncewicz and Eva Hoffman. These writers have been left out of the so-called East European "canon," which in America is dominated by the celebrated male dissident avant-garde. Basing my approach on Bakhtinian dialogic theories and on select feminist, cultural, and historical criticism, I discuss immigrant and exiled women's novels as a part of an inter-cultural and open genre, which invites fictional, autobiographical, and documentary expressions. Chapter I explains how my outsider-focused readings explore ethnic and literary "otherness" that results in different types of female narrative: one written for the newcomer by the host culture, one presented by the newcomer to her new country, and one that often has to be hidden as a subtext, in which the woman writer describes her frustration and her disillusionment with her new home. Close readings of Antin's, Stern's, and Yezierska's texts in Chapters II-IV focus on their alternative subtexts that challenge the traditional immigrant narrative and describe the woman's ideological, textual, and gender-related oppression within the ambivalent Promised Land. The discussion of such concepts as authorial voice and identity, ethnicity, gender, and subjectivity is continued in Chapter V, which examines the works of Maria Kuncewicz, who carries the collective female discourse into the post-war totalitarian era. Chapter VI argues that the acculturation process involves a denial of sexuality in all newcomers, since they occupy the feminized position of the "other" regardless of gender, and reads Nabokov's Pnin as a dialogic text employing the "feminine" themes discussed in the women writers. The conclusion looks at Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation as a text ushering the East European women's literary tradition into the post-totalitarian era and engaging in a dialogue with Julia Kristeva's Strangers to Ourselves.