Outside the conveniences of maps and ideas of tectonic plates Europe has never been a fixed space but rather always resides within the flexible and permeable boundaries of convention. Who belongs to Europe, who is excluded, and the consequences of this demarcation have changed dramatically over time. This course is designed to investigate the creation, transformation and enforcement of these boundaries of Europe.
Research Paper
The final and most tangible result of this course will be a 20-25 page research paper written on a topic of your choice under the larger rubric of “Europe and Representation.” In writing this paper you will critically engage and evaluate primary and secondary sources and present your analysis of them in clear and persuasive writing. In short, you will engage in the creation of historical narrative as an academic historian. These everyday tools of the historian will serve you well in any field you chose to enter.
The process of writing this research paper will be spread over the course of the semester in a series of small steps. During the first week we will schedule a tour of the library and discuss the many research possibilities our library and computer system affords us. Our first series of classes, under the heading “Europe in Peripheries(?) / Europe(s) as Periphery?”, introduce the types of questions that we will address in our discussions and in your research paper. We will schedule individual meetings in my office during the second and third week to discuss the types of questions you would like to investigate in your research paper and arrive at possible topics and methodologies. By week four you are expected to come to class with several preliminary topics for the research paper. By week five you will have selected your topic and will come to class with a one-paragraph description of your plans, including your ideas for sources. This week will also mark the beginning of the section “Europe and Other / Europe as Other” where we will read and discuss the problem of Europe as it pertains to Eastern Europe—this section is intended to be a more grounded investigation of a single locus of the European problem and to serve as a series of models upon which you can begin thinking about your own work for this class. By week seven you will have compiled a working bibliography for your paper. In class we will discuss each other’s paper topics and construct research strategies. By week nine you will write a formal two-page research proposal will be due in class. By week eleven you will have completed a rough draft of your research paper. In weeks twelve and thirteen, two of your peers will present a written critique of your draft and the class as a whole will offer commentary. The final draft will be due in class on week fifteen.
Peer review is an integral part of the writing process, helping both the author, with critical commentary, and the reviewer in strengthening his/her own writing. You will write a peer review for two of your fellow students. Your peer reviews will be 2-3 pages long and should demonstrate critical reading of the work and provide constructive criticism for the author. Your peer reviews should focus both on style and content of the paper and provide suggestions on how to improve it in terms of style, argument and the use of historical evidence.
As well as providing you with the methodological and analytical tools for engaging in historical research, this class will ask you to actively take part in a larger conversation of historical issues within the class. I expect this class to allow us to delve deeply into the historical topics of each week’s readings. To that end you need to make sure that you arrive to class on time ready to discuss the weekly readings, having carefully read and thought over the material. You must take an active role in the class discussions.
You will also be responsible for leading one week of class discussion. The first week of class you will chose one of the weekly topics and readings and plan to lead the class discussion on that topic. This will require you to read the material particularly carefully, briefly introduce the materials to the class and to steer the class discussions. As part of preparing the discussions, you will e-mail a series of 8-10 questions to other class members four days before our class meeting.
In a class of this nature it goes without saying that a classroom environment in which everyone feels comfortable is essential. You should treat your fellow classmates with respect, listen carefully to their comments and respond to them in a polite manner.
You will be required to respond in writing to each week’s readings before class. This will provide you an opportunity to focus your thoughts on the weekly readings and to prepare for the class discussion. Assignments will be announced at the end of each class and will be kept short (around one doubled-spaced typed page). They will due via e-mail to me no later than midnight the night before our class.
The Department of History adheres to the guidelines on academic integrity contained in the Code on Campus Affairs and the Handbook of Policies and Regulations Applying to All Students. Cheating and plagiarism will be penalized in accord with the penalties and procedures indicated in that source. All students are responsible for familiarizing themselves with the definition of these infractions of academic honesty. Copies of the Code on Academic Affairs can be consulted in the History Department, at the Illini Union Information Desk and on line at www.uiuc.edu/admin_manual/code/rule_33.html.
Course Texts:
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provicializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000).
Goldsworthy, Vesna, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (Yale, 1998).
Naipaul, V.S., A Bend in the River (New York: Vintage International, 1989).
Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Wolff Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1993).
This week we will meet each other. I will introduce the course its goals and requirements, the basics of reading, researching and writing history and assign weekly discussion leaders. We will also begin thinking about possibilities for research topics.
During this first meeting we will arrange a time for library tour.
Said’s work, Orientalism, investigates the collection, standardization and use of knowledge about the ‘East’ by the ‘West’ as a means of generating and maintaining power as well as a manner of defining the self. This section examines the manner in which “Europe” is created through representations of the “Other.” In your readings for this week think about the way this act of creation impacts our understandings of what Europe is. What are the power relations involved in this act of representation? What are the stakes for the manner in which we interpret such ideas as “civilization,” the production of knowledge, geographical space and “the modern.”
Readings:
Said, Edward, “Knowing the Oriental” in Orientalism, (Vintage, 1979), 1-31.
Fabian, Johannes, “Taking Stock: Anthropological Discourse and the Denial of Coevalness” in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, (Columbia University Press, 1983), 25-37.
Diderot, Denis, “Supplemet to Bougainville’s ‘Voyage,’” in Remeau’s Nephew and Other Works, trans by Jacques Barzun and Ralph H. Bowen (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1956), 179-228.
During this class we will schedule a time for to meet individually with each of you to discuss possibilities for you research paper.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past : Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), selections.
Readings:
Naipaul, V.S., A Bend in the River (New York: Vintage International, 1989).
This section begins looking at the question of “Europe” within the geographical boundaries of the continent itself. The readings for this week address doing anthropological work in Greece. How are “degrees of Europeaness” measured and applied and what are the consequences? How are notions of time constructed? How are the boundaries of Europe constructed in representation and how they are enforced and negotiated? What role do “aborigines” play in constructing their selves? What is their relationship to knowledge and power? We will also be investigating the question of Europe the through the Macedonian movie Before the Rain.
Readings:
Film:
Before the Rain: A Tale in Three Parts, New York : PolyGram Video, 1995.
This week we will be addressing the question of how Europe came to be conceived of in terms of East and West. How did Western Europe define itself by comparison to invented Eastern European cousins? How were notions of the Enlightenment born in the imaginings of a depraved East? How did these imaginings become mapped and fixed in real geographical conventions?
Readings:
Wolff Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1993).
“Introduction”: (1-16)
“Possessing Eastern Europe: Sexuality Slavery and Corporal Punishment”: (50-88)
“Mapping Eastern Europe: Political Cartography and Cultural Cartography”: (144-194)
“Conclusion”: (356-376)
and either:
“Addressing Eastern Europe, Part I: Voltaire’s Russia” (195-234)
or
Readings:
Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford University Press, 1997).
“Balkans as Self Designation” 38-62
“From Discovery to Invention, From Invention to Classification” 116-139
“Between Classification and Politics: The Balkans and the Myth of Central Europe” 140-160
Flemming, K. E., “Orientalism, the Balkans and Balkan Historiography,” in The American Historical Review, October, 2000.
“‘And What Should I do in Illyria?’: English Literature and the Balkans” (1-13)
“The Balkan Threat: Vampires, Spies Murder and the Orient Express”
--Dracula and the Balkan Gothic(73-86)
--Balkan Settings of the Spy Novel (87-100)
--On the Orient Express Route (101-111)
Readings:
Verdery, Katherine, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, 1996).
“Introduction” (3-17)
“What Was Socialism and Why Did It Fall” (18-38)
“The ‘Etatization’ of Time in Ceauşescu’s Romania” (39-58)
Kligman, Gail, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceauşescu’s Romania, (University of California Press, 1998) (1-48)
Lenin Lives! (something on ostalgia?)
Film:
This week’s readings speak specifically to Eastern European notions of themselves in the European context. “Europe” does not play an unambiguous role in the formation of Eastern European mentalities. What role did (and does) notions of “Europe” play in Eastern European self-definition? What possibilities does this suggest? What relationship did (and does) Eastern Europeans seek to have with a larger Europe? What role did (and does) “Europe” have to play in Eastern European conceptions of history, time, place and culture?
Readings:
Iorga, Nicolae, Byzantium After Byzantium, trans. by, Laura Treptow, (Portland, OR: Center for Romanian Studies, 2000). selections
Hitchins, Keith, "Imagining Europe: Autochthonist Social
Thought in Southeastern Europe, 1920-1940," in Hitchins, The Identity of
Romania (Bucharest, 2003),
101-118.
Bakic-Hayden, Milica, and Robert M. Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,” in Slavic Review, 51, no.1 Spring 1992.
Assignment: 15 page rough draft of your paper
No readings
This week’s readings focus on the transformation brought about by the radical socio-economic, political and cultural change brought about by the collapse of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. What does this mean for questions of Europe? How do understandings of “Europeaness” change? What are the possibilities brought on by notions of a Central Europe, most forcefully put forward by Czech exile Milan Kundera? What place does socialism have in the shared experience of a European past after 1989?
Readings:
In Search of Central Europe, George Schöpflin and Nancy Wood, eds., (Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, 1989), selections.
Antohi, Sorin, "Habits of the Mind: Europe's Post-1989
Symbolic Geographies,"
in, Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath,
edited by Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu (CEU Press, 2000), 61-77.
Kundera, Milan, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York Review of Books, vol. 31, no. 7, April 26, 1984.
Moise, Dominique, Michael Mertes and Timothy Garton Ash, “Let the Eastern Europeans In,” New York Review of Books, vol.38, no. 17, October 24, 1991.
Readings:
Seton-Watson, Hugh, “What is Europe, Where is Europe? From Mystique to Politique,” in In Search of Central Europe, George Schöpflin and Nancy Wood, eds., (Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, 1989), 7-29.