Detour to Otherness: Cultural Identity Discourse in Contemporary *American, Ukrainian, and Polish Literatures

"The comparison demonstrates that despite the extensive tradition of addressing diversity in the American literature, the horizontal lines of intercultural exchange or the non-hierarchical ""ethnorelativism of representation"" emerges in American writing only recently, in the works produced as post-traumatic responses to the disturbing intrusions of alterity. Ukrainian identity politics moves along the lines of a diachronic symbolic displacement, the post-authoritarian shift, and calls into question the relevance of a homogenous cultural discourse supplied by the traditional national narrative. Contemporary Polish literature discovers domestic others and re-negotiates its cultural space by challenging the norm of maintaining a restricted set of definitions of the Polish. Regardless of the differences in literary traditions or the kinds of intercultural experience, the works from all three cultures depend on the same techniques of symbolic displacement and contextualization in constructing the meaning of a given culture."

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Comparative Literature

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Tkachuk, Yuliya Oleksandrivna

Contributors dc:contributor

• Blake, Nancy

• Literature, American

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3395517

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/87300