That alluring land (Ta zem vabna) which they both have never seen: imaging and imagining America in the words of Timrava and Virginia woolf

Abstract

Bozena Slacikova “Timrava” (1867-1951) and her British contemporary Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) wrote scathingly about America without having visited the place. Timrava’s 1907 short “That Alluring Land” (“Ta zem vabna”) and Woolf’s 1938 essay “America, which I have nerver seen” expose the workings of the “technology of place”. The term “technology”, which means “coming to presence” and “concealing” in Martin Heidegger’s sense, is appropriated as part of this paper’s proposition that the America imaged and imagined by both writer is a result of negotiations between the “concrete place” of the senses, both senses, both writers’ socio-cultural constructs, and the “abstract place” of the imagination.