Abstract
Jacques Derrida's remark, ‘What is proper to a culture is to not be identical to itself,’ serves as a point of departure for a discussion of artistic and ethnic identities in late-19th and late 20th century literatures. The first part of this paper studies the images of the European and the colonized ‘Other’ in Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness and J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. The second part examines notions of artistic and ethnic identity in the culture of fin de siècle Vienna. The ‘crisis of liberalism’, which plays a pivotal role in Carl Schorske's study of that culture, gains new and urgent meaning through the ethnic conflicts that arose in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire. Studying artistic identity today, we must distinguish between notions of diffuse identity in post-modern culture and the ethnic identity that writers not infrequently assume in Middle-and Eastern Europe.
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