Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / Bo StrÃ¥th and Nina Witoszek -- Preface / Bo StrÃ¥th and Nina Witoszek -- Introduction / Bo StrÃ¥th and Nina Witoszek -- Postmodernism and Textual Anxieties / Hayden White -- Will Bosnia Survive Postmodernity? / Stjepan Mestrovic -- The ‘Postmodern' Challenge / Detlef Briesen -- Literary Deconstruction as a "Newspeak" / Wojciech Skalmowski -- Civilization, Discipline, Disorder / Peter Burke -- The Fetish of Dialogue in Postmodern Discourse: The Case of Mikhail Bakhtin / Nina Witoszek -- Heroism and the Intimacy of Post-modern Morality / Piotr Kawiecki -- Nostalgic Memorials and Postmodern Survival in Russia / Svetlana Boym -- The Construction of Bourgeois Identity in National and Urban Contexts: Bologna after Italian Unification / Axel Körner -- Inventing the Wheel? The Postmodern Catching up with Witold Gombrowicz / Krzysztof Stala -- Culture, Identity and Politics: Aspects of National Politics in Graz and Ljubljana at the Close of the Nineteenth Century / Egon Pelikan and Heidemarie Uhl -- Gorbachev as a Postmodern Hero / Wislawa Suraska -- After Postmodernism, A Dream of Transformation / Ewa Domanska -- Historiography and the Challenge of Postmodernism / Georg G. Iggers -- History, Theory, and Transitions of Modernity / Björn Wittrock -- Contributors / Bo StrÃ¥th and Nina Witoszek.

This volume is designed to bridge a gap in the current theoretical debate about the nature, scope and relevance of postmodern perspectives in the humanist and social sciences in Eastern and Western Europe. While the debate has been reasonably comprehensive and certainly abrasive in Western European and Anglophone countries, it has signally failed to incorporate the viewpoints of Eastern European scholars and intellectuals. Even the current appropriation of Mikhail Bakhtin as a prophet of the postmodern is, paradoxically, a monologic engagement with his thought rather than a dialogic encounter of cultures. Doubtless different historical experiences, ideology and social aspirations go some way to account for the weariness of Eastern Europe with postmodern challenge and its glad embrace by Western scholars. The volume comprises some fifteen essays by leading historians, literary theorists and social scientists from Western and Eastern Europe and America. It has a threefold aim: firstly, to illuminate the distinctiveness of current Western and Eastern European theorizing about history and society; secondly, to reveal points of tension and disagreement, and, finally, to open up a space for a meeting of seemingly incompatible worlds.

English

Description based on print version record.