Imagining Home: Exilic Reconstructions in Norma Manea and Andrei Codrescu’s Diasporic Narratives - Hardcover

In an age of shifting social and political landscapes, there is one constant challenge individuals and groups have to face: that of internalizing the tension between the two opposing tendencies that rule the world today, homogenization and heterogenization. People transgress the limits of nationality, ethnicity, and culture in order to become citizens of the world, while at the same time longing for stability and certainty.Imagining Home: Exilic Reconstructions in Norma Manea and Andrei Codrescu's Diasporic Narratives interprets the polymorphous development of two exiled writers' identities, from the point of view of their "migrant" condition. Their restless, nomadic existence, perfectly reflected in the geographical territories mapped by the books under discussion, involves crossing boundaries, negotiating difference, and the colonizing imposition of a foreign culture. The outcome provides an insight into the concepts of Romanianness and Americanness, analysing them through the notions of alo-images and infra-images, while at the same time developing a context and a reading approach for Eastern European immigrant narratives.

Anamaria Falaus holds a Master's degree in Canadian Studies from the North University of Baia Mare and a Doctorate in Philology from the University of the West, Timisoara, Romania. She has completed her PhD with a dissertation on the problem of exile, alo-images and infra-images in the docu-fiction of two Romanian exiled writers, Norman Manea and Andrei Codrescu. Her main areas of interest are exile, ethnicity, multiculturalism, and imagology as reflected in postcolonial and post-communist literature.