Fin de siecle Balkans: The cultural politics of orientalist imagination at Europe's margin.

摘要

This dissertation takes up one of the most fraught areas of Europe, the Balkans. Variously part of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Byzantine Empires, and now often considered part of Central Europe, this region has always been considered Europe's border between the Orient and the Occident, Christian Europe and the Muslim East.;Aiming to clarify the politics of drawing cultural borders in this region, I look into the relations between the Habsburg Monarchy -- an empire whose identity was from the beginning constructed on the basis of Catholic Christianity and which thus, for the Balkans, represented the Western European legacy -- and the Balkans as an intermediate space between the West and the East. I demonstrate that the simple dichotomy of Orient versus Occident is insufficient to explain the utter complexity of the region. Therefore, I propose that cultural multi-belonging, historical disruption, and recurrence are the essence of the Balkans as a cultural and geo-political space.;In order to circumvent the difficulty inherent in drawing the borders of the Balkans, I subdivided the region into four different Sub-Balkans and focused on the "Balkans" of the former Yugoslavia, substantiating my discussions with fourteen main works from the early nineteenth to the end of the twentieth centuries written in German, English, and Serbian/Croatian. Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina are the three regions where the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Byzantine legacies encountered each other in an extremely complex network of political decisions followed by cultural contacts and, therefore, illustrate vividly the above mentioned cultural multi-belonging, historical disruption, and recurrence.;The literary analysis brought me to the conclusion that the fictional imagination of the Balkans can only be defined by the ambivalent term "utopian dystopia," which I coin in my dissertation. This oxymoron encompasses the utopian projections of the Austrian/Habsburg writers onto the Balkans as a "locus amoenus," a place of intact nature and archaic communities; the dystopian presentations of the Balkans by Balkan authors as an abnormal no-place (ou-topia) onto which the historical tensions of empires have been projected; and, finally, the depictions of the Balkans in the Western media as an eternal or recurring dystopia.