The 'post' in postcolonial and postmodern: The case of Central Europe

The question guiding this dissertation is: Does the "post" in "postmodern" equal the "post" in "postcolonial"? That is, how does the anti-essentialist thrust of postmodern theory answer to fundamental notions of identity that are encountered in postcolonial cultural situations?;A theoretical introduction outlines how Central Europe's historical problems of national identity affect individuals' strategies for identity construction, given that the region has been multiply colonized and decolonized from Roman times through today's realignments of the modern East and West Blocs. Issues of identity-construction are reflected in the narrative strategies of the region's literatures, as well: writers like Jaroslav Hasek, Milan Kundera, and Franz Kafka are divided by language barriers, yet all express how individuals in the region inherit unstable personal identities and historical consciousness--how Central Europeans share a postmodern approach to telling their own stories in ways that undercut the colonizing empires' narratives about the region's colonized margins.;The mainstream of Central European literature is represented in the first chapter by Claudio Magris' Danube (Danubio), a novel in the guise of travel literature. Magris organizes his narrative like the flow of a river to express the flux and the continuity among various constructions of Central Europe, as reflected in the multiple identities of the characters inhabiting the region (including the river itself). I outline what possible "realities" can be offered by various constructs of Central Europe and what identities emerge for individuals living within this fictional geopolitical construct, this shifting reality of experience.;The second part of the study (chapters three and four) presents a dissenting view from a more "minor" strand of Central European literature (in Deleuze's sense): the example of the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleza, an intellectual from the southern Central European margins speaking for the region's most underrepresented inhabitants.;The conclusion explains the prevalence of the postmodern narrative strategies among postcolonial writers in both aesthetic and geopolitical terms: as expressing individual displacement of identity in postcolonial contexts, and as offering a critique of nationalism from the point of view of nondominant groups, as a postmodern critical gesture.