Looking in the iron mirror: Eastern Europe in the American imaginary, 1958--2001

The dissertation argues that during the last four decades of the twentieth century Eastern Europe functions as a generative transnational space in the production of American culture. I demonstrate the complex interdependence between American literature and U.S. foreign policy on Warsaw Pact countries. By analyzing a series of actual and imaginative U.S. engagements with Soviet bloc countries, I delineate the region's status as a central cultural and geopolitical contact zone. I examine works by figures such as John Updike, Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, Milan Kundera, Jonathan Franzen, and F. O. Matthiessen within sociocultural frameworks like the State Department's program of Cultural Exchange, the privileging of voices from political emigres, and recent methodological transformations in American studies. The dissertation straddles the decades before and after 1989, Eastern Europe's annus mirabilis, in order to accentuate the importance of interpreting post-Cold War American cultural and institutional transformations within an international framework of the collapse of the Soviet-bloc countries. I demonstrate that the recent international reorientation in American studies is a distinct product of the postsocialist decade. My analysis concludes that Eastern Europe is the prototypical transnational realm whose demise facilitates the discipline's transatlantic turn towards investigations of U.S. imperial practices in other geographical locales.