The Uncanny Space of “lesser” Europe: Trans-border Corpses and Transnational Ghosts in Post-1989 Eastern European Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With reference to two novels, the Polish Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night (1996) and the Ukrainian Juri Andrukhovych’s The Twelve Rings (1998), this article explores the ways in which the new novel of the postcommunist transition period reinvents the local as the necessary condition of new formulations of belonging and identity, contrasted with the imposed amnesia of state-controlled uniformity of the communist period. Reinventing the ravaged local, these novels unravel the uncanny aspect of place, realized as the intrusion of the ghost of the exterminated, forgotten or exiled other, within the transcultural space of the borderland. These novels offer a radical rethinking of the local that opens it up to its unfamiliar content: the uncanny ghostly or spectral presence of national and cultural otherness, and the traces of its extermination and obliteration in the context of a wider (European) history. My reading involves a comparative mode in which postcolonial theory informs the reading of texts from Eastern Europe, with particular attention to the problematic of the local vis-a-vis larger, universalist discourses of the nation, the empire, and Europe as worldliness. I accentuate the discourse of “lesser” Europe developed in these texts as a way of challenging the safe familiarity of tropes of Europe with reference to its uncanny margins.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".