Alien—Different—One’s Own. Ethnocultural frontier: conceptual, typological, and situational aspects
This is the first paper of the three-issue series about the ethnocultural frontier planned by the author. A long time ago, the scholarly discussions on the problems of the frontier, which became quite vivid in the last decades, had overcome the initial relatively local frames of the American ‘thesis of the frontier’ connected with the specific conditions and circumstances of the Wild West epoch. Currently, these discussions cover various fields of humanities and are becoming more relevant at the present stage of the global historical development, as they signal new civilizational traits and specific features of this stage. By this, the author implies globalization and glocalization processes that encompass multiplicity and variability, also unpredictability, oddity, and non-stability of combinations as well as the diversity of ambivalent forms and transitive states emerging on this basis. The paper defines key theoretical and methodological principles forming the intentional (according to R. Carnap) approach to the concept of the frontier; it also suggests a number of typological models of the ethnocultural frontier (frontier literary zones; transitive periods and states in the historicalliterary process, as well as in the language sphere, in creative work, and psychology of an author; comparative collations, etc.). Finally, it analyzes selected literary cases that emerged in geopolitical and ethnocultural zones of Ukraine (namely Austro-Ukrainian and Polish-Ukrainian frontiers) within the framework ‘Alien — Different — One’s own’. The analysis, both diachronic and synchronic, considers contextual factors, i.e. genetic, historical, geopolitical, international, ideological, and sociocultural contexts. In the following two papers of the series, the author intends to deal with the eastern ethno- and linguocultural frontier of Ukraine (Kharkiv, Donbas) and the Ukrainian-Jewish literary frontier.