Unspoken Stories Underlying a More Aware Europe: The Multimodal and Multidiscursive (Mis)Construction of Eastern Europe

The main purpose of this research is to unearth the practices and discourses underlying the rise of a dichotomy that has long cleft Europe, that is, Eastern and Western Europe. Starting from the concept of civilisation, first expounded in the France of the Enlightenment, this study, which heavily draws on Larry Wolff’s (1994) analysis of orientalism, aims to explore, from a multimodal and social-semiotic viewpoint, a series of enduring myths surrounding Eastern Europe generated by Western European culture. The initial sections of this study will explore the way the Grand Tour, a voyage of discovery noblemen would undertake as part of their educational program, and western politicians and clergymen on diplomatic missions to Russia and Poland, resulted in a boom in travel journals that would significantly affect the (mis)construction of Eastern Europe in the eyes of westerners. The second section, which refers to diaries, travel journals and memoirs authored by western travellers, will delve into the way such misleading narratives crept into scientific and medical discourses. In this respect, attention will be focused on a series of revealing excerpts from William Coxe’s (1795) diary, which reports the false sighting of a bison in Lithuanian forests and the invention of Plica Polonica, a fabricated illness for which no medical evidence has ever been provided. Finally, the concluding section will seek to establish how the meaning-making process, described by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) and Kress (2010) in their investigation into social-semiotics and multimodality, can be triggered by maps, semiotic entities in their own right. In this regard, this study will analyse some samples of maps (Boria 2012) drawn up in the context of the Cold War and explain just how much ideology these conveyed. In light of the entrance of multiple ex-Soviet Republics into the European Union (EU) (e.g., Hungary, Poland, among others), the ultimate aim of this contribution is to heighten awareness about the need to overcome internal struggles inside Europe to cultivate and nurture a shared supranational memory decoupled from divisive nationalistic narratives.