utopia

In the European cultural tradition, the image of the islands brings together the geographical strangeness with a social utopia. The paper traces its historical alterations, as attested in documentary and literary travel stories, in comparison with Leibniz's thesis of the “best world”.

The paper interprets the critical (and readers’) success of Georgi Gospodinov's novel “Time Selter”, linking it to the potential crisis of contemporary liberal consciousness. Richard Rorty's concept in his book “Chance, Irony, and Solidarity” (1989) is used as a theoretical approach to defining liberal cultural consciousness. The article analyses the asymmetry in the representation of private self-creation and the construction of collective forms of identity. The main focus is on the workings of memory and the different modes in which the past functions in the construction of private and collective identity.