“Being Elsewhere” — Chronotopes of “Never” and “Nowhere” in the Works of Contemporary Trans-Cultural Writers
“Being Elsewhere” — Chronotopes of “Never” and “Nowhere” in the Works of Contemporary Trans-Cultural Writers

Summary/Abstract: Otherness has become one of the central categories in the culture, literature, philosophy of Western modernity. “Other” helps to define the norm, acting as a negative point of reference, giving birth to various exclusion strategies and stereotypic images, which have been by now quite thoroughly described. Development of postmodern theories of otherness in the last decades had led to regrouping of the major oppositions of self/other, native/alien, putting the “other”, the “different” in the center, giving him/her the voice, which is clearly seen in the active development of various cultural critical theories and mini-discourses, and at the same time, powerlessly stating again and again the absolute enigmatic nature of otherness. Postcolonial theory, as one of the oldest and widest in its grasp on the world map of otherness discourses, as well as actively developing lately trans-cultural, hemispheric, continental, transatlantic and other studies with neo-universal, global, and comparative bents, have tried to get rid of the “radical alterity”,accentuating trans-cultural interactions and their cognitive results, refraining from regarding the “world literature” in the usual segments of separate national traditions and languages, as they had been interpreted before, realized in the popular concept of postcolonial dissolving of national culture as a stable construct and language as teleology.[...]

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