Larry Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe

The week we read two texts on the mindset and alternative viewpoints of the Enlightenment: Larry Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, and Laurent Dubois' “An enslaved Enlightenment: rethinking the intellectual history of the French Atlantic." Much of this paper will focus on Wolff's text because it is the larger of the two, but there are common themes between the two texts that I wish to cover as well.
Inventing Eastern Europe, explores the different kinds of ways that Easter Europe was envisioned during the Enlightenment-era: mapping, peopling, traveling, writing (literature/poetry), etc., and how those visions came to be. One of the things that is most interesting about this text is the discovery of Eastern Europe as more of an idea, rather than a geographical place. There were certain traits which were thought to be "Eastern" or "Western," and it did not matter where the nation was located on the map (which was probably wrong/skewed anyways), but which category it fell into. Examples of this are Prague, geographically could be …show more content…
Throughout his text he discusses what he calls a "condescending perspective" that Western Europe takes on Eastern Europe (255). Western Europeans automatically assume that they are superior to Eastern Europeans because of what they have heard and written- and travel logs and literature have a lot of do with creating that perspective. One piece of literature in the text goes as far as to have a Western European scientist character be representative of all science and reason in the midst of Eastern European and Oriental superstition; even though the other characters far outnumbered the Western European, he was still considered superior (75). There were also Western ideals placed as rubrics for Eastern Europe; i.e. if Eastern Europe did not live up to Western standards, the West was by far