This paper addresses current narratives on refugees and Muslim others within the social and literary spaces of today's Europe. Drawing on Sara Ahmed and others, it sets out to better comprehend what lies behind European fears of the other and, in doing so, raise questions about the ways of facing those who are desperately knocking on Europe's door.
Inspired by the well-established trope of Eastern Europe’s in-betweenness, this article uses the notion of liminality to explore the images of Eastern Europe during the Cold War in the works of three American authors: John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth. Not only do these works map Eastern Europe as liminal in the imagological sense of the term, that is, as oscillating between competing narratives of otherness and familiarity; empathy and hostility; the East and the West, but also the very experience of venturing behind the Iron Curtain is charged with potentiality: the Eastern-European cityscape becomes the contact zone between cultures and the locus of self-discovery for the American characters. The resultant imaginative geography is at once contemporary and allochronic; political and personal, as it reiterates the Cold War balance of power while at the same time recycling existing representations of the area and reflecting the authors’ sensibilities.
This essay analyses Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success (2018) as an inquiry into the formative narratives of the American identity—the American Dream and self-making—through the story of a hedge-fund manager, Barry, who abandons his wife and child with autism to travel across the US just as the country is about to elect Donald Trump as president. Building on the intertextual connection with The Great Gatsby (1925), this essay contextualizes the ongoing corruption of these narratives within the culture of unbridled individual advancement, arguing that Trump’s victory has further normalized opportunism and the dissociation between individual success and collective well-being. Although this hollowing out of the American Dream and self-making renders a rather bleak picture of contemporary US, the novel suggests the possibility of change, both for Barry and America, as it calls for the re-insertion of the other into the formative narratives of American identity, thus expanding their current limits.
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