SOURCE: Fjellestad, Danuta Zadworna. “‘The Insertion of the Self into the Space of Borderless Possibility’: Eva Hoffman's Exiled Body.” MELUS 20, no. 2 (summer 1995): 133-47.

In the following essay, Fjellestad explores the marginalization of Central European American literature by focusing on how Hoffman's Lost in Translation portrays the immigrant writer's experience.

For the European, even today, America represents something akin to exile, a phantasy of emigration and, therefore, a form of interiorization of his or her own culture.

—Jean Baudrillard, America

Our present age is one of exile.

—Julia Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual”

The demand to recognize an irreducible presence of the Other in American literary history has brought about qualifications or the substitution of “American” with ethnic-specific adjectives, leading to distinctions between, for instance, African American, American Indian, Asian American, Chicano, Hispanic, and Puerto Rican literature. Redefining American Literary History, edited by A. La Vonne Brown Ruoff...