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The effort of this thesis is to use an anthropologically non-traditional subject, written literature, to comparatively explore a cross-cultural condition, exile. In justifying the use of written literature in anthropological enterprises, I contend that we are unnecessarily constrained by assumptions we have inherited regarding the concept of culture, the consequence of which has been the denial to literature of a constitutive role in the making of social life and history. Literary narrative can be culturally constitutive, as is exemplified by the three authors considered here.

This study covers the literary, critical, theoretical, and film works of three Bulgarian immigrant intellectuals in France: Julia Kristeva (1940 - ), Maria Koleva (1941 - ), and Tzvetan Todorov (1939 - ). Through their own exile during the Cold war, they reconstruct in their works the way East and West, both flexible constructions, perceive each other. We focus on Bulgaria and France---countries representing East and West respectively. Following the works of these author-creators, the term East refers to the former Soviet bloc and the Near and Far East, while the term West---to the liberal democracies of Western Europe and the United States. Kristeva contributes to this study as a linguist, psychoanalyst, and novelist, Koleva---as an independent director, novelist, and playwright, Todorov, as a linguist who borrows from sociological, political, and philosophical thought These intellectuals analyze cultures and counter-cultures in a time when the divisions in Europe and the world are changing. After the fall of communism and the recent European Union Eastern enlargements, the East/West European divide is now gradually waning. This quasi-disappearance reflects a changing political dynamics on an overall international level where new divisions appear (continental, ethnic, South versus North). In Europe, the internal East/West question is giving way to an external question---Europe and the countries that seek accession The interdependence, encounter, and friction of East and West are discussed from the perspective of the three francophones. The first chapter concentrates on the impossibility to separate East from West in Kristeva's works while focusing on the relation between origins and contemporary crisis. Chapter two---on Koleva---accentuates on the importance of personal, artistic, and revolutionary encounters. The third chapter discusses the tension between East and West in Todorov's thought, while examining alterity, modernity, and humanism The subject of this study is the twentieth century Bulgarian francophonie represented in the transition and translation of intellectual thought between East and West. Questions of identity, belonging, and otherness are examined in these works---representations/presentations/analyses. With the admission of Bulgaria in the European Union in 2007, these works can be seen as predicting, preparing, and making possible / acase@tulane.edu

On the basis of extended field research in Sofia, Bulgaria, between 2004 and 2006, this project provides an ethnographic account of the predicament of art and culture producers after the end of socialism. The end of socialism deprived the Bulgarian intelligentsia from its economic security, prestige, and a sense of clear moral mission. Now young cutting-edge artists, writers, designers, theater directors and other culture producers seek a way out of this predicament and aspire to become moral leaders of the nation. Through ethnographic participant-observation at the lifestyle magazine Edno, a mouthpiece for this social segment, and through research radiating from the offices of the magazine to the fringes of contemporary Bulgarian art and culture, this project demonstrates that the new culture producers comprise a social segment in a state of flux, an elite in-the-making. While its future is uncertain---it could solidify in a new dominant faction of the intelligentsia, could disintegrate or could take the shape of a qualitatively new configuration---its present condition sheds light on post-socialist debates about artistic merit, the importance of national versus international recognition, and the changing value of cultural capital. The dissertation investigates how the young culture producers strategically code their artistic preferences and ways of life as "European," and demonstrates that they strategically capitalize on a historical local anxiety that Bulgaria is deficient and less modern than an imagined "Europe." The project is indebted to a Bourdieusian understanding of the relationship between taste and social class, and pays close attention to aesthetic preferences in two fields: lifestyle and creative work. At the same time, it departs from Bourdieu in recognizing that while well-suited to account for social reproduction, his model is less successful in explaining social production: the emergence of new social groups and the re-ordering of existing social relations in the context of rapid social change. The project addresses this problem through the prism of Foucauldian ethics. It suggests that the young culture producers have an at least partially correct understanding of their objective circumstances and consciously reflect on the mismatch between their expectations, and the reality of post-socialist Bulgaria.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2004. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-09, Section: A, page: 3375. Adviser: Mikhail Iampolski.

No description available.

Thesis (D.M.A.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-06, Section: A, page: 2239. Adviser: Donna Buchanan. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-231) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.