Abstract
The space and its representations have become important field of study in the humanities after the spatial turn. Moreover, the increasing popularity of digital humanities and growing interest for digital research methods are opening new perspectives for literary scholarship.
The imagology is just one of the scientific fields where these new developments could offer new research possibilities. In my lecture I will examine representations of space of two Easter European countries with complex national/cultural identity, that have existed almost simultaneously.
As a starting point, I am using principles of the post-essentialist imagological theory (Aachen School). I will also try to position my research in the framework of digital humanities.
I am using research methods of computational criticism to make a literary map of Eastern Europe based on a relatively limited digital corpus. By applying quantitative analysis on these texts and creating resulting visualizations, I am trying to find answers to the following questions: Is Eastern Europe represented as a homogenous entity in Dutch literature? Or are there certain differences in the literary representations of East Central Europe and the Balkans (what Todorova calls "hierarchies of Eastern Europe ")? How positive or negative is the cultural valorisation and what is the role of geographical space in this? Were these representations of the two countries changing throughout the 20th century? If yes, can those shift in experience be explained regarding the historical context? Furthermore, my aim is to examine the Dutch self-image as "a construct taking shape in an ongoing encounter with shifting manifestations of otherness" (Leerssen, 2016).