THRESHOLDS OF BELONGING: LIMINAL SPACE AND CULTURAL PASSAGE IN TO THE LIGHTHOUSE AND IKKI ESHIK ORASI

This article offers a comparative reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and O‘tkir Hoshimov’s Ikki eshik orasi (1986) through the interlocking lenses of liminality and threshold poetics. Departing from the well-charted question of childhood memory, it argues that both novels organise their meaning around a threshold — the window in Woolf and the door in Hoshimov — that operates at once as an architectural feature, a narrative device, and a figure for existential and cultural passage. Drawing on Arnold van Gennep’s and Victor Turner’s anthropology of the rite of passage, Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope of the threshold, Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of the half-open door, and Homi Bhabha’s notion of interstitial “third space,” the study shows that the two writers put the threshold to opposite ends. In Woolf, the window and the deferred voyage frame an individual, existential liminality that remains suspended and elegiac, extended into the emptied ten-year interregnum of “Time Passes.” In Hoshimov, the “space between two doors” names a collective, cultural liminality between tradition and modernity that the narrator finally crosses and integrates. Threshold poetics thus emerges as a shared structural grammar of world literature that nevertheless encodes divergent cultural models of selfhood: separation and vision in the English modernist tradition, passage and communal continuity in the Uzbek. The article contributes a new theoretical frame for two canonical works and a portable method for cross-cultural spatial analysis.