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This book examines the eastern European seminar of the late 1980s and early 1990s—an ongoing academic meeting place outside the formal rubric of the university—tracing its evolution into a social movement on the street and identifying the political force of the theoretical conversations that took place there. It also shows how these theories reflect the loss of socialist idealisms and established materialist frameworks that eventually evolved into a set of heterotopic visions with a fundamentally altered sense of materialism.
It provides both glimpses of a genuinely alternative world to the Western academy that its denizens are so prone to critique, one in which oral discourse and dialogism were especially prominent values, and a utopian view of the Western intellectual world from that now-lost space.
"In short, this is a book that is both deeply original and an important contribution to work in the field; a book that is accessible to an interdisciplinary audience and of remarkable theoretical and scholarly sophistication.”---—Elizabeth Weed, Brown University
“Nikolchina provides a challenging account both of the internal dynamics of East European culture just before the collapse of Communist regimes and of the, perhaps inevitable, clash between dissident thinkers from Eastern Europe and western post-structuralist academics in this period and beyond. Her highly personal and engaging narrative concludes with a courageous and ambitious attempt to bring about a much needed dialogue between Eastern Western European modes of thinking.”---—Andrew Wachtel, President, American University of Central Asia