Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River(Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History)

From the German Black Forest to the Romanian and Ukrainian shores where it flows into the Black Sea, Europe's second longest river connects ten countries, while its watershed covers four more. The Danube serves as an artery of a culturally diverse geographic region, frustrating attempts to divide Europe from non-Europe, and facilitating the flow of economic and cultural forms of international exchange. Yet the river has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention, and what exists too often privileges single disciplinary or national perspectives. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach to the river and its cultural imaginaries, the anthology Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River remedies this neglect and explores the river as a site of transcultural engagement in the New Europe.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction River Futures Marijeta Bozovic and Matthew D. Miller Chapter 1 Danube Limes: The Limits of the Geographic-Cultural Imaginary Katherine Arens Chapter 2 Taking the Waters: The Danube’s Reception in Austrian and Central/Eastern European Cinema History Robert Dassanowsky Chapter 3 Viennese Blood: Assimilation and Exclusion in Viennese Popular Music Micaela Baranello Chapter 4 Caught in the Effluvial Draft: The Fluid Sources of the Folktale Henry Sussman Chapter 5 New York on the Danube: The Transatlantic Transference of Habsburg Ethnology and Autocracy in Kafka’s Amerika: The Missing Person Robert Lemon Chapter 6 Private Looking and Collective Memory in The Danube Exodus (1998) Jennifer Stob Chapter 7 Jelinek and the Roma: A Danubian Tragedy Karl Ivan Solibakke Chapter 8 Ravaged Empire: Water and Power in Prewar Hungary Robert Nemes Chapter 9 Cold Days in the Cold War on the Hungarian-Serbian Border Jessie Labov Chapter 10 Allergic Reactions: Danube and the Ex-centric Imaginary of Europe Tomislav Z. Longinović Chapter 11 Against the Stream: The Danube, the Video, and the Nonbiodegradables of Europe Dragan Kujundžić Chapter 12 Deconstructing Claims to (Jewish) Victimhood Amanda Lerner Chapter 13 Modernization’s Undercurrents: The Folk in Postwar Socialist Romanian Architecture Juliana Maxim Chapter 14 Where the Water Sheds: Disputed Deposits at the Ends of the Danube Tanya Richardson Bibliography Notes on Watersheds and Its Contributors Index

About the Author :
Marijeta Bozovic is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, a specialist in Russian and Balkan literature and culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the author of Nabokov's Canon: From Onegin to Ada (forthcoming with Northwestern University Press, 2016). Her research interests include poetry, avant-gardes, diasporas and transnational culture, translation and adaptation across media.

Review :
“If one considers the book as an entangled narrative fabric …, it transforms into the forum set forth by the editors: to meet and to merge, to enter into a critical dialogue, and to combine many perspectives and disciplines into one book. As a whole, Watersheds goes beyond national perspectives and disciplines. It is more unifying than separating, more inclusive than exclusive. This book not only gives a more transnational direction to this interdisciplinary field of study, but it also opens new ways of looking at a range of authors and works that are not included. … After the Soviet Union dissolved and the central European states were incorporated into the European Union, the tension between inclusion and exclusion perhaps seemed to be resolved for a brief moment; East and West seemed to be closer to each other. But after multiple terrorist attacks, the refugee crisis, the Brexit vote, and recent elections, the notion of Danubia possesses an even stronger resonance, which suggests a tolerance of difference in a time when it appears that many new borders are dividing Europe. This emerging atmosphere of exclusion makes Watersheds an important contribution to scholarship of the Danube; it is a valuable book for everyone who can image a world without borders to read.” —Christiane Fischer, Rutgers University, German Studies Review Vol. 41 No. 3