
In Search of a Dream America
Place in the Life Writing of Eastern European Immigrants
Irina V. Rodimtseva(Author)
Peter Lang Verlag
Published on 6. April 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
254 pages
978-3-0343-2423-6 (ISBN)
Description
This book explores immigrant life writing and examines the complex relationship between the America imagined in the dreams of would-be immigrants and their ability to establish connections to actual places in America. The authors discussed in the book (Vasily Aksyonov, Mary Antin, Eva Hoffman, Edward Limonov, and Miriam Potocky-Tripodi) come to North America from different places in Eastern Europe and publish their books at different times of the 20th century, but for all of them an attachment to the new place begins before emigration. The initial stages of this process are imaginative - learning and dreaming about America, visualizing it as an ideal place - and the immigrants' encounter with their new country is mediated by this idealized image of America. Although some immigrant autobiographers profess an immediate bonding to American places, the texts examined in this book demonstrate that the process of claiming a new place as one's own is often rife with ambiguities and setbacks. Only by negotiating the gap between the dream and the encountered America can an immigrant begin to feel at home in the new place. At the same time, the bond to the home country can never be severed, and that rejected place becomes a reference point for comparisons or even a model for organizing the new environment. Briefly stated, immigrants maintain attachments to multiple places - physical, imagined, and remembered.
More details
Series
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Lausanne
Switzerland
Edition type
New edition
Illustrations
14 Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 225 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
362 gr
ISBN-13
978-3-0343-2423-6 (9783034324236)
DOI
10.3726/978-3-0343-2424-3
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Irina V. Rodimtseva is an Assistant Professor of English at Alderson Broaddus University in Philippi, WV. She received her Master's Degree in English from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) State University in Russia and her doctoral degree from West Virginia University in the U.S. Her research interests are 20th-century American literature (in particular immigrant and prison literature) and place studies. Her articles have been published in Arizona Quarterly and the Nabokov Studies.
Content
Introduction - <<That Alluring Land>>: Eastern European and Russian Visions of America - Mary Antin Takes Possession of America - Eva Hoffman in the Land of Yearning - Vasily Aksyonov and Edward Limonov in the Land of Freedom - Epilogue - Bibliography