Marko Juvan
Marko Juvan, MAE, works at ZRC SAZU Literary Institute and teaches literary theory at the University of Ljubljana. He has been a board member of REELC/ENCLS, ICLA/AILC (Literary Theory, Executive Committee), and Academia Europaea (Literary Studies). He is a member of the editorial boards of Primerjalna književnost, CLCWeb, and arcadia. He writes on intertextuality, world literature, and spatial humanities. Recent books: History and Poetics of Intertextuality (2008), Literary Studies in Reconstruction (2011), Prešernovska struktura in svetovni literarni sistem (Prešernian Structure and the World Literary System, 2012), Hibridni žanri (Hybrid Genres, 2017), Worlding a Peripheral literature (2019). He is currently editing a volume on the 1968/1989 nexus in literature and theory.
Address: Ljubljana, Ljubljana Urban Commune, Slovenia
Address: Ljubljana, Ljubljana Urban Commune, Slovenia
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The allegory is a narrative trope common to short stories (novellas) by Edvard Kocbek (1904–81) and Jean Bruller – Vercors (1902–91). Vercors’s 1948 collection "Les Yeux et la Lumière" and Kocbek’s 1951 novellas entitled "Strah in pogum" (Fear and Courage) are structured according to the "permixta allegoria" in which the allegorical meanings of narrative become explicit in philosophical passages. In addition to twofold narration structure (the story is shaped by a prior idea), the allegory shows transitions from realist references to »ontological« generalizations and a more or less schematic plot. As an indirect way of communication, the allegory acquires different social roles in the work of the compared authors: Vercors’s allegorical approach is rooted in the literature of the national resistance period (conveying to the reader humanist ethical standards) while it allowed Kocbek to introduce a dialogized perspective on the partisan anti-Nazi resistance and social revolution. The ideological differences between the two authors affected the differences in the allegorical construction of their short stories. Vercors filtered the elements of existentialism through Kantian ethical tradition adapted to current social needs. Therefore, his characters and storyline are more schematic, their allegorical underpinning more obvious. On the other hand, in Kocbek’s short stories, the narrator’s perspective is paradoxically ambivalent because it attempted to unite Christianity, existentialism and Marxism against the background of the proto-existentialist and existentialist literature and Catholic post-symbolism.
Članek na primeru Cankarjevega Mojega življenja (1914/1920) in njegove medbesedilne navezave na Rousseaujeve Izpovedi obravnava protislovje med singularnostjo in generičnostjo ubeseditve "življenja" v avtobiografiji. Avtobiografija se s tega vidika ponovno izkaže kot žanr, ki problematizira zvrstnost in zvrstne sisteme.
geographical and historical origins as well as the places that allow us to establish cognitive and creative interferences between cultural spaces inscribed in the library holdings. Books evoke a variety of imaginary spatial models, including the global, while their own spaces are also physical and meaningful. From its beginnings up to the present expansion of digital textuality, the medium of the book appears in the context of economies, which set the direction and breadth of the spatial reach of the messages it transmits and encodes. Book history is therefore a field that lies within the interest of comparative literature.
According to Foucault, the essays of Montaigne and Bacon (a typically modern genre founded on humanistic individualism) embody the shift from the medieval commenting relationship toward traditional knowledge to the empirical and critical relationship from which modern science developed on the basis of Cartesian notion of method. According to Good, the essay did not join the systematic, disciplinary self-regulation and progressism of science, but persisted in the singularity of literary works. The essay further interdiscursively confronted personal experience with various areas of discussion, and in writing it shaped a fragmentary, perspectivized, and aesthetic truth. Regardless of the literary singularity of the essay, one cannot overlook its reliance on the sensus communis. The essay developed from intertextual connection to the loci communes, from commentary on and use of ancient topics. Kant’s sensus communis is represented in the aesthetic relationship to knowledge: as a “semi-literary” genre, the essay moves between the “quasi-judgments” of literature (these serve the “disinterested” comprehension of the portrait of a fictitious person) and the verifiable judgments of nonfiction discourse. The essay absorbs the concepts of other disciplines and melds them into a promiscuous valence of the poetic word, which gives the impression of total life experience. The knowledge that the essay presents acquires an ambiguous status: verifiable propositions are captured in modality, through which the perspective of personal presence is revealed in aesthetic experience. However, the criterion of the truth of the aesthetically conveyed testimony is no longer its agreement with the facts, but the authenticity of the existence portrayed. The sensus communis in the essay also appears in the sense of ‘common sense,’ ‘general knowledge,’ and ‘that which is generally understood or comprehensible.’ Essayists have often tackled topics pertaining to general life and experientially accessible to everyone, and they have not been immune to stereotypes, prejudices, and conclusions based on common sense. The stereotype itself establishes a subject of experience, inasmuch as it is spontaneous and “pre-scientific.” Essayists rest on the loci communes of public discourse when they seek to engage the “general reader.” Since the eighteenth century, the essay has become established in newspapers, where it is identified with journalistic genres (e.g., the feature column or feuilleton) and has become vulnerable to the ideologies reproduced in them. The essay’s tension between the singularity of literarized existence and the ideologized knowledge of the (media) sensus communis is also shown in contemporary Slovenian texts of this genre (e.g., Rožanc and Jančar).
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The allegory is a narrative trope common to short stories (novellas) by Edvard Kocbek (1904–81) and Jean Bruller – Vercors (1902–91). Vercors’s 1948 collection "Les Yeux et la Lumière" and Kocbek’s 1951 novellas entitled "Strah in pogum" (Fear and Courage) are structured according to the "permixta allegoria" in which the allegorical meanings of narrative become explicit in philosophical passages. In addition to twofold narration structure (the story is shaped by a prior idea), the allegory shows transitions from realist references to »ontological« generalizations and a more or less schematic plot. As an indirect way of communication, the allegory acquires different social roles in the work of the compared authors: Vercors’s allegorical approach is rooted in the literature of the national resistance period (conveying to the reader humanist ethical standards) while it allowed Kocbek to introduce a dialogized perspective on the partisan anti-Nazi resistance and social revolution. The ideological differences between the two authors affected the differences in the allegorical construction of their short stories. Vercors filtered the elements of existentialism through Kantian ethical tradition adapted to current social needs. Therefore, his characters and storyline are more schematic, their allegorical underpinning more obvious. On the other hand, in Kocbek’s short stories, the narrator’s perspective is paradoxically ambivalent because it attempted to unite Christianity, existentialism and Marxism against the background of the proto-existentialist and existentialist literature and Catholic post-symbolism.
Članek na primeru Cankarjevega Mojega življenja (1914/1920) in njegove medbesedilne navezave na Rousseaujeve Izpovedi obravnava protislovje med singularnostjo in generičnostjo ubeseditve "življenja" v avtobiografiji. Avtobiografija se s tega vidika ponovno izkaže kot žanr, ki problematizira zvrstnost in zvrstne sisteme.
geographical and historical origins as well as the places that allow us to establish cognitive and creative interferences between cultural spaces inscribed in the library holdings. Books evoke a variety of imaginary spatial models, including the global, while their own spaces are also physical and meaningful. From its beginnings up to the present expansion of digital textuality, the medium of the book appears in the context of economies, which set the direction and breadth of the spatial reach of the messages it transmits and encodes. Book history is therefore a field that lies within the interest of comparative literature.
According to Foucault, the essays of Montaigne and Bacon (a typically modern genre founded on humanistic individualism) embody the shift from the medieval commenting relationship toward traditional knowledge to the empirical and critical relationship from which modern science developed on the basis of Cartesian notion of method. According to Good, the essay did not join the systematic, disciplinary self-regulation and progressism of science, but persisted in the singularity of literary works. The essay further interdiscursively confronted personal experience with various areas of discussion, and in writing it shaped a fragmentary, perspectivized, and aesthetic truth. Regardless of the literary singularity of the essay, one cannot overlook its reliance on the sensus communis. The essay developed from intertextual connection to the loci communes, from commentary on and use of ancient topics. Kant’s sensus communis is represented in the aesthetic relationship to knowledge: as a “semi-literary” genre, the essay moves between the “quasi-judgments” of literature (these serve the “disinterested” comprehension of the portrait of a fictitious person) and the verifiable judgments of nonfiction discourse. The essay absorbs the concepts of other disciplines and melds them into a promiscuous valence of the poetic word, which gives the impression of total life experience. The knowledge that the essay presents acquires an ambiguous status: verifiable propositions are captured in modality, through which the perspective of personal presence is revealed in aesthetic experience. However, the criterion of the truth of the aesthetically conveyed testimony is no longer its agreement with the facts, but the authenticity of the existence portrayed. The sensus communis in the essay also appears in the sense of ‘common sense,’ ‘general knowledge,’ and ‘that which is generally understood or comprehensible.’ Essayists have often tackled topics pertaining to general life and experientially accessible to everyone, and they have not been immune to stereotypes, prejudices, and conclusions based on common sense. The stereotype itself establishes a subject of experience, inasmuch as it is spontaneous and “pre-scientific.” Essayists rest on the loci communes of public discourse when they seek to engage the “general reader.” Since the eighteenth century, the essay has become established in newspapers, where it is identified with journalistic genres (e.g., the feature column or feuilleton) and has become vulnerable to the ideologies reproduced in them. The essay’s tension between the singularity of literarized existence and the ideologized knowledge of the (media) sensus communis is also shown in contemporary Slovenian texts of this genre (e.g., Rožanc and Jančar).
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Slovenian literary historians often discussed the operation of Austrian state censorship in Carniola during the Pre-March Era in terms of the conflict between the unique national poet France Prešeren and the moralistic, provincial, and narrow-minded representatives of the secular and Church authorities. Rather than adding further variants to this narrative, the present essay starts with the paradox of the Habsburg censor as an instrument of imperial thought control and, concurrently, an educated expert that parallels the modern literary critic. At that time, the institution of the censor underwent a significant change in the Empire: it became individualized, dependent on the censor’s subjective aesthetic judgment and symbolic capital, as well as on the contingent power relations in the local literary field. A case in point is Jernej Kopitar’s censoring the poetry almanac Krajnska čbelica in the 1830s. His censorial assessment was marked not only by his literary tastes and philological knowledge but even more so by his Austroslavist and Herderian strategy of national revival, which assigned the aesthetic and individualist high literature but a secondary role. As such, Kopitar culture planning was at odds with Prešeren’s and Čop Romantic universalism that elevated the importance of poetry for the early national movement. It turns out that Kopitar’s censorship represents the individualization of the anti-Romantic censor as the counterweight to the Romantic individualization of the writer.
The parody and Bakhtin: Bakhtin discussed the parody only in his morphological and stylistic or sociohistorical analyses of the novel. His theoretical outlines of its intertextual ethos were not adjusted to his notions of its historical functions. But within his conceptions of dialogism he elaborated a sophisticated, seminal model of the parody presented as a bivocal discourse. Anticipating the views of the new historicism, he reconciliated the structural-semantic, pragmatic, sociocultural and historical aspects of the parody (as a discourse, style, textual element or a genre). According to Bakhtin, the parody promotes ideological and stylistic pluralism in the sociolingual constellation of a culture, and undermines the power of predominant ideas by revealing their conditionality. On the other hand, its effects in the culture can be also conservative, unifying.
The valorization of translation that is going on since the beginning of the 21st century has been decisively influenced by the global renaissance of Goethe’s Weltliteratur. More than a decade after Ďurišin’s theory of the world literary system and based on the reinterpretations of Goethe’s notion of world literature, a new scholarly paradigm is in full swing that attempts to transcend national literary history, comparative literature, and postcolonialism (Lawall, Casanova, Moretti, Damrosch, etc.). However, the translation was of key importance already in the historical beginnings of the conception of Weltliteratur, with which Goethe aimed at promoting humanist aesthetic cosmopolitanism, creatively reviving national literature and establishing German literature as a new hub of international literary life. The present article focuses on how experiencing translations had formed Goethe’s ideas of circulation and the self‑reflection through otherness and how these ideas were recently reinterpreted by Damrosch and Thomsen. Juxtaposing works of various European and “Oriental” literatures (either in the original or in translation), Goethe reflected on his literary and cultural identity and discovered new qualities of his aesthetic experience. Generally speaking, the translation — because of its position within the asymmetries of the world systems of economy, languages, and literatures — is not only the primary mode of transnational literary circulation and cross‑cultural dialogism, but also the relay for the global spread of Western geo‑culture and the hegemony of its aesthetic discourse. The possibility of a particular literary text to gain access to the global literary circulation depends, among other factors, on the fact whether the work in question has been produced in a “major” Western language or has been translated in a global language.
Key words: literary translation, world literature, literary systems, comparative literature, Goethe Johann W.
The imaginary worlding of Prešeren through perspectives and canonization internal to Slovenian literary system has proven to be ideologically successful. His actual presence in the global literary space, however, does not correspond to homegrown perceptions of his value. Prešeren has been lost in translation. The possibility of a particular literary text written in a peripheral language/literature to gain access to the global literary circulation depends on the consecrators form the centers of the world literary system (Casanova). Prešeren is a classic of a peripheral literature. This fact has prevented Prešeren to become internationally recognized as a poet of the romantic hypercanon, with the exception of languages and publishers from Slovenia or countries that used to belong to the same states or cultural-political alliances (Habsburg Empire, Yugoslavia, Slavic world). Moreover, his international recognition has been hampered by his complex poetic texts. They are difficult to translate without risking reducing Prešeren’s singular voice to a quasi-universal locus communis, unable to invent and establish for him a new, universal audience.
The present study takes into account all the aforementioned aspects of intertextuality. It is devoted to the preceding and similar ideas from Antiquity until the present; it treats the terms which signify intertextual phenomena (topos, quotation, allusion, paraphrase, imitation, translation, parody, travesty, pastiche, and so on), and concepts on meaning-structure dependency between texts (imitatio/aemulatio, memory, influence, tradition, meta-communication, and so on). The study follows the history of explicit theories of intertextuality, after Kristeva and Barthes, in two ways. The first follows the modifications of general intertextuality (from M. Riffaterre to S. Greenblatt), while the second traces the development of special intertextuality or citing (from L. Jenny to S. Holthuis).
From 1968 to 1975 the term ‘intertextuality’ also appeared in Slovenia, at first, rather sporadically and mainly in translations. Due to its background in early post-structuralism, it contributed to the strengthening of the literary neo avant-garde (so-called Ludism; this can be seen in the work of A. Medved, T. Kermauner, and others), and the materialist-Lacanian theory of signifying systems (S. Žižek, B. Rotar, and others). In the ‘Eighties a new interest was shown in the context of post-modernism and the influences of late post-structuralism; a systematic theory of intertextuality was developed after 1985 (M. Juvan, and others).
The notion of intertextuality in literary science contributed to the formation of a theory on relations between subject, text, language, social discourse, cultural memory and historical processes. It laid foundations for new explanations of ‘the spirit of time’, ideologies, themes and genres. It brought individual intertextual phenomena, which had not been dealt with holistically in the past, into a united framework. The study concludes with a system of literary intertextuality. The socio-historically movable border between general intertextuality and citing is determined by an intertextual cultural code which is part of literary competence, and also by paratextual and intratextual indices/symptoms of citing, e.g. quotations in titles or stylistic agrammaticality. The intertextual representation of pre-texts or conventions is descriptive (e. g. metafictional notes and digressions), transpositional or imitational (e.g. quotation, travesty, collage; stylisation, pastiche). Derivations are texts which are structurally dependent on intertextual representations of pre-existing texts or sign systems. Intertextual references are not as extensive, but can be very significant for establishing textual meaning (e.g. mottos). The text, and the pre-text evoked in the text, are interpretants of each other. Relations between the two extend between affirmation and negation, with ambivalence being quite common. Intertextual derivations and references, which have become common in literary culture, are explained and classified as intertextual figures and genres (quotations, topoi, borrowings, reminiscences; parody, travesty, cento, and so on).
Contents: Theory of Literary Discourse – Literary History between Narrative and Hypertext – Postmodern Textology and Electronic Media – The Structure of Literary Text and the Event of Meaning – The Text and Genre – The Text and Style – Fiction, Reality, and Laws – Textual and Contextual Spaces – Cultural Memory and Literature
Entries written by Marko Juvan for the lexicon Literatura (2009) for the following fields: linguistics, discourse theory, genre theory, sociolects and style; intertextuality, dialogism, intermediality and hypertext; currents of modern literary theory (Russian Formalism, Prague linguistic circle, Tartu semiotic school, Nitra school, cognitive science, cultural studies, geocriticism); cultural studies; semiotics and semantics.
Contents: Theory of Literary Discourse – Literary History between Narrative and Hypertext – World Literature(s) and Peripheries – Postmodern Textology and Electronic Media – The Structure of Literary Text and the Event of Meaning – Literariness – The Text and Genre – Stylistic Subject-Fashioning – Fiction, Reality, and Laws – Textual and Contextual Spaces – Cultural Memory and Literature
“Juvan's book is a lucid and thoughtful introduction to literary studies. Grounding his work in thorough knowledge of the history of the discipline and its current methodological concerns, Juvan helpfully reassembles a range of concepts central to the exploration and appreciation of literature. He does so fully aware of, and carefully responding to, the lessons of deconstruction and post-structuralism that have been urging us to rethink literariness, genre, style, and so many other mainstays of traditional literary studies.” (Galin Tihanov, University of Manchester)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Novel beyond Nation
Jernej Habjan
1 Novels before Nations: How Early US Novels Imagined Community
Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse
2 Pre-modern Joking Relationships In Modern Europe: From Le Neveu de Rameau to Le Neveu de Lacan
Jernej Habjan
3 The Nation Between the Epic and the Novel: France Prešeren’s The Baptism on the Savica As a Compromise “World Text”
Marko Juvan
4 Autonomy after Autonomy, or, the Novel beyond Nation: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
Emilio Sauri
5 The Narrator and the Nation-Builder: Dialect, Dialogue, and Narrative Voice in Minority and Working-Class Fiction
Alexander Beecroft
6 Novel, Utopia, Nation: A History of Interdependence
Hrvoje Tutek
7 Neomedievalism in Three Contemporary City Novels: Tobar, Adichie, Lee
Caren Irr
8 Crisis of the Novel and the Novel of Crisis
Suman Gupta
With starting points that explain modernism beyond the Western canon and address the modernist phenomena in the Second World, the second part of the monograph discusses modernism in the context of “the imaginative proximity of social revolution” (Perry Anderson) of the global student movement, in which modernism experienced its “last season” (Franco Moretti). The idea that literature, with its internal transformation, leads to a profound change in the entire social field (from politics to morality to lifestyle) inspired the neo-avant-gardes and led to the inclusion of literary life in political protest, the production of “revolutionary literature,” (post)structuralist text theory, and the poetics of modernist literary works. Slovenia, as a country on the periphery between the communist East and the capitalist West, caught up with the metropolis of Paris in the late 1960s. Even more, with the artistic group OHO and the Lacanian School of Ljubljana, concepts emerged that, precisely because of their specific peripheral genealogy, found appeal throughout the world.
The volume focuses on two central themes. The first one is meant to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Anton Ocvirk (1907–1980), the founder of Slovenian comparative literature as an independent scholarly discipline: the papers in the first section discuss Ocvirk's academic works and public activity and attempt to place him within Slovenian and European comparative literature. The second central theme involves a variety of issues, which have been also implied in the contextualization of Ocvirk’s comparatism: the relationship between comparative literature and related or competing methods, schools, and disciplines; the conceptual and subject-specific definition of world literature, and seeking the most appropriate procedures for treating it; characteristics of certain “small” comparative literature schools comparable to the Slovenian school; and ideological, epistemological and methodological issues of literary history. The broadest common framework includes the awareness of the contemporary plural or crisis state of comparative literature, the promotion of its independence in the future, and efforts to renovate it on the basis of critical self-reflection. - Read on Google Books: https://books.google.si/books?id=H8yTCwAAQBAJ&dq=svetovne+knji%C5%BEevnosti+in+obrobja&hl=sl&source=gbs_navlinks_s
CONTENTS
DARKO DOLINAR: Pogled nazaj, pogled naprej [Retrospect and Prospect]
I. ANTON OCVIRK, SLOVENSKA PRIMERJALNA KNJIŽEVNOST IN NJEN EVROPSKI KONTEKST [ANTON OCVIRK, THE SLOVENE COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, AND ITS EUROPEAN CONTEXT]
JANKO KOS: Filozofski, nacionalni in ideološki temelji slovenske primerjalne književnosti [Philosophical, National, and Ideological Grounds of Slovenian Comparative Literature]
DARKO DOLINAR: Ocvirkovo pojmovanje literarnega dela [Anton Ocvirk’s Conception of the Literary Work]
MARKO JUVAN: Ideologije primerjalne književnosti: perspektive metropol in periferij [Ideologies of Comparative Literature: Metropolitan and Peripheral Perspectives]
MILOŠ ZELENKA: K teoretičnemu pojmovanju t.i. obče literature v obdobju med vojnama (Wollman in Ocvirk in njuno razumevanje van Tieghema) [On the Theoretical Concept of General Literature in the Interwar Period (Frank Wollman and Anton Ocvirk, and their Reflections on Paul Van Tieghem)]
TONE SMOLEJ: Lucien Tesnière in slovenska primerjalna književnost [Lucien Tesnière and Slovenian Comparative Literature]
JOLA ŠKULJ: Temeljne koncepcije slovenske komparativistike in aktualni komparativistični vidiki [Founding Concepts in Slovenian Comparative Literature and Current Comparative Initiatives]
VLASTA PACHEINER-KLANDER: Orientalske literature v programu profesorja Ocvirka za študij svetovne književnosti [Oriental Literatures in Ocvirk’s World Literature Studies Program]
MAJDA STANOVNIK: Ocvirkov koncept primerjalne književnosti in »Sto romanov« [Anton Ocvirk’s Concept of Comparative Literature and the Collection One Hundred Novels]
FRANCE BERNIK: Zbrana dela – temelj slovenske literarne vede [The Collected Works: The Foundation of Slovenian Literary Studies]
JANEZ VREČKO: Ocvirkova teza o konstruktivizmu pri Kosovelu [Ocvirk's Thesis of Constructivism in Kosovel]
DUŠAN MORAVEC: Estetska merila Ocvirkove gledališke kritike [Esthetic Criteria of Ocvirk’s Theater Criticism]
BORIS A. NOVAK: Ocvirkova teorija verza ali kje so časi, ko se je literarna veda prevažala s črnim mercedesom? [Ocvirk's Theory of Verse, or What Happened to the Days when Literary Studeis Drove Around in a Black Mercedes?]
II. PRIMERJALNA KNJIŽEVNOST MED UNIVERZALNIM IN LOKALNIM, MED LITERATURO IN KULTURO [COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BETWEEN THE UNIVERSAL AND THE LOCAL, BETWEEN LITERATURE AND CULTURE]
JEAN BESSIÈRE: Literatura, etika in sodobna vprašanja literarne teorije [Comparative Literature and Ethics: Reinterpreting the Universalism/Relativism Dichotomy]
JOHN NEUBAUER: Kaj so ingresivne literarne zgodovine in zakaj jih potrebujemo? [What are Ingressive Literary Histories, and Why Do We Need Them?]
TOMO VIRK: Univerzalna ali nacionalna, globalna ali lokalna – ali pluralna primerjalna književnost? [Universal or National, Global, or Local: Or a Plural Comparative Literature]
ZORAN MILUTINOVIĆ: Jasno opredeljen pojav in enotna perspektiva: ali je zgodovina svetovne književnosti možna? [One Clearly Defined Phenomenon and a Unified Perspective: Is a History of World Literature Possible?]
EUGENE EOYANG: Sinergije in sinestezije: znotrajsvetna primerjalna književnost [Synergies and Synesthesias: An Intraworldly Comparative Literature]
PÉTER HAJDU: »Neoheliconove« lokalne tradicije in sedanje strategije [Neohelicon’s Local Traditions and Present Strategies]
SONJA STOJMENSKA-ELZESER: Kaj pomeni študirati primerjalno književnost v Makedoniji? [What Does It Mean to Study Comparative Literature in Macedonia]
VLADIMIR BITI: Od literature h kulturi – in nazaj? [From Literature to Culture – and Back]
VANESA MATAJC: Soočenje s trendom: primerjalna književnost, kulturne študije, kulturna zgodovina in literarni kanon [Facing a Trend: Comparative Literary Studies and Cultural History]
EVALD KOREN: Dama, ki izgine, ali, je literatura v »novi« primerjalni književnosti in »novih« zgodovinah nacionalnih literatur resnično ogrožena? [The Lady Vanishes, or Is Literature Truly Threatened in the New Comparative Literature and the New Histories of National Literatures?]
MONICA SPIRIDON: »Nova zavezništva« v digitalni dobi: knjiga, znanost in bajt [The ‘New Alliances’ in the Digital Age: The Book, the Science, and the Bite]
GALIN TIHANOV: Prihodnost literarne zgodovine: trije izzivi 21. stoletja [The Future of Literary History: Three Challenges in the 21st Century]
Imensko kazalo [Index]
O avtorjih [Authors]
Summary
Čeprav je posameznika za cenzorja kooptiral monarhični birokratsko-policijski aparat, namenjen obvladovanju javne sfere in nadzoru vseh oblik tiskane komunikacije, se cenzor pri konformističnem izpolnjevanju svoje vloge ideološkega varuha absolutizma ni popolnoma podredil političnim interesom vladavine, monarha in privilegiranih stanov, prav tako pa ni slepo uresničeval črke in duha cenzurnih predpisov. Razsvetljeni absolutizem je namreč s svojo modernizacijo stanovske družbe, ki sta jo za reprodukcijo imperialnega režima zahtevali svetovna ekspanzija kapitalizma in industrijska revolucija, ustvaril tudi pogoje za svoje revolucijsko ali evolucijsko preseganje. Prav ti pogoji so vzporedno s prenosom cenzure s cerkvene na posvetno oblast v 19. stoletju izoblikovali tudi nov lik cenzorja.
Cenzor v reakcionarni predmarčni dobi tako ni deloval zgolj kot instanca državnega uma in podrejeni člen v razvijajočem se modernem birokratskem aparatu, ki naj bi monarhu zagotavljal funkcionalno upravljanje imperija, ujetega v protislovje med statusom quo dednih stanovskih privilegijev ter dinamizmom revolucij in kapitalistične pobude meščanstva. Kljub svoji vpetosti v rigidno proceduro cenzuriranja in knjižne revizije je posameznik, ki ga je oblast imenovala za cenzorja določenega diskurza, discipline oziroma jezika, prav zaradi svoje strokovne izvedenosti in jezikovnega znanja v postopku vseskozi deloval kot individuum, kot avtonomni subjekt s sebi lastno presojevalno močjo, temelječo na svoji izobrazbi (strokovni, jezikovni), pridobljenem strokovnem ugledu, socialnem omrežju in prestižu.
Cenzor je bil praviloma izobraženi izvedenec, ki se je – tako kakor Kopitar ali Čop – po zaslugi razsvetljene modernizacije in demokratizacije habsburškega izobraževalnega sistema neredko socialno vzpel iz tretjega stanu. S svojim branjem, redigiranjem, komentiranjem, mnenji in končno presojo dela, predloženega v cenzuro, je absolutistični oblasti zagotovil strokovno podlago za policijski nadzor nad obtokom diskurza. Bil je torej po eni strani varuh interesov privilegiranih stanov in absolutistične vladavine. Toda zunaj svoje cenzorske vloge je bil tak posameznik v prvi vrsti dejaven na literarnem, umetniškem, znanstvenem ali kakem drugem diskurzivnem polju, njegovi interesi pa so zato odstopali od oblastnih. Zato je prek svoje cenzorske vloge ter z njo legitimiranih subjektivnih ocen in sodb okusa lahko mimo raison d'état poskusil uveljaviti svoj partikularni interes, ki si ga je oblikoval znotraj svojega polja, in tudi prek cenzurno-policijskega aparata poseči v področje in socialno omrežje svojega zunajcenzorskega delovanja.
V procesu estetske avtonomizacije in nacionalizacije literarnega sistema je cenzor kot člen modernega policijsko-upravnega aparata postal dvojnik prav tako modernega lika literarnega kritika, saj je nič manj odločilno vplival na izbor, sestavo, vrednostno hierarhizacijo in obtok domačega oziroma uvoženega literarnega repertoarja. Ne samo zato, ker je institucija cenzorja postala moderno individualizirana, odvisna ne le od cenzorskih predpisov, temveč tudi od subjektivnega prepoznavanja kršitev s cenzuro varovanih norm, od osebnih sodb okusa in estetske presoje literarnih del. Paradoksno, celo oblastne usmeritve cenzure so v svojem paternalizmu do pismenega ljudstva pripomogle k estetski avtonomizaciji literature in razredni zasnovi kanoniziranega estetskega diskurza: v literarnem sistemu so podprle prevlado visoke kulture nad množično oziroma resne literature nad trivialno, obenem pa izkazovale večjo ideološko-moralno tolerantnost do konzumentov literature iz vladajočih stanov in izrazitejšo restriktivnost, ko je šlo za množičnejše bralstvo iz nižjih slojev.
Na primeru cenzuriranja pesniškega almanaha Krajnska čbelica bomo pokazali, kako so se v dokumente cenzurnega postopka poleg sistemsko predvidljivih cenzorskih dejanj vpisovale tudi sledi subjektivnih sodb in divergentnih partikularnih interesov cenzorjev kot posameznikov, vpletenih v snovanje slovenskega literarnega polja ter njegovo umeščanje v avstrijski imperij in nastajajoči svetovni literarni sistem. Ali je torej individualizacija antiromantičnega cenzorja dopolnilo romantične individualizacije literata, kar je literarni zgodovini omogočilo pripoved o Kopitarju in Prešernu kot antagonističnih junakih?
Early nineteenth-century poems that address issues of writing, dissemination, reception, critical consideration, and use of literature convey through their form the Romantic ideology that Jerome McGann presents as a false consciousness of the real socioeconomic conditions of writing. The ideologized forms of self-reflection were part of the self-regulatory mechanisms through which literature – as a relatively autonomous modern social subsystem (according to Siegfried J. Schmidt) – reacted to and attempted to rhetorically influence its socioeconomic context. In Romanticism, poetic self-reflection became an inseparable and emphatic feature of aesthetic literature, especially lyric poetry. The metapoetry of Alexander S. Pushkin (1799–1837) and France Prešeren (1800–1849) hybridized the language of poetry with aesthetic thought and Romantic ideology to instill in their readers the conviction that poetry was entitled to an aesthetic autonomy distinct from bourgeois society and opposed to its own commodification in the book market. By confronting poetry with capitalist reality, emphasizing individualism, and mythologizing poets as prophets and national seers, Romantic metapoetry also sought to introduce its own form of public authority that could deal with modern print media and the politics of cultural nationalism.
Using Slovenian literature as an example, the paper discusses the role of multilingualism and monolingualism in the interdependent processes of nationalization and worlding a peripheral literary system. It presents the cultivation of literary language as an instrument of nation-building and analyzes Slovenian language policy with regard to Slavic centrisms or interliterary communities on the one hand and the presumed universality of the literary world-system on the other. Finally, the contribution focuses on the (temporary) break with the monolingualism of the national literary paradigm in the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s. Starting from the hypothesis that the “long 1968” as a transgressive and global event marks a significant linguistic change in modern literary cultures, the contribution identifies symptoms of the decentralization of the Slovenian literary language (e.g., the increasing use of elements and structures borrowed from outside the literary and national, mainly from sociolects, slang, minority languages, historical and dialectal variants of Slovenian and foreign languages).
Nineteenth-century literature witnessed the move from classical to modern writing: while peripheral European literatures seek to establish national identity with the aid of the epic as a privileged form of classical writing, the central and well-established national literatures demonstrate their identity with the novel as a popular form of modern writing. In Slovenian culture, Prešeren’s narrative poem Baptism on the Savica (1836), which thematises the involuntary compromise of an epic hero and his renouncement of the national cause, was paradoxically canonised as a sacred text that defines “Slovenianness” and as such gives rise to ever new reinterpretations. This is in contrast to Jurčič’s The Tenth Brother (1866), the first Slovenian novel, which– according to Moretti’s formula – comes across as an (unhappy) compromise between a foreign genre form imported from the centre and the local Slovenian subject matter and perspective. This is why, in the 19th century, a peripheral nation was constituting itself on the “sacred text” of a compromise but singular epic, rather than merely on the mass printing of compromise novels.
(Paper presented at the international conference "Novi razmisleki o evropskih središčih in obrobjih", Journal Dialogi, Univ. Maribor, 17 Sept. 2015)
Medtem ko se je imaginarno in znotrajbesedilno »svetovljenje« (Kadir) slovenske poezije prek estetskega kozmopolitizma s kanonizacijo Prešerna kot nacionalnega pesnika, kongenialnega klasikom svetovne literature, na domačem ozemlju potrdilo kot stvarno uspešno, pa je bil dejanski prodor Prešernove poezije v mednarodni obtok počasen in neizrazit. Evropski hiperkanon romantike se je namreč oblikoval na podlagah socialnega kapitala, ki so si ga avtorji akumulirali že v dobi svojega delovanja. Prešernove možnosti, da bi pred svojo smrtjo dosegel evropski sloves, so bile nikakršne že zaradi njegove razredne prikrajšanosti, še bolj pa seveda zaradi njegove vezanosti na slovensko literarno polje in jezik, katerih položaj v mednarodni literarni tekmi je bil obroben (Casanova). Drugi razlog, da Prešeren ni postal svetovni avtor, tiči v prevodu, najpomembnejšem dejavniku mednarodnega obtoka besedil. Prešernova pesniška govorica se je namreč izkazala za neprevedljivo (prim. Stanovnik). V prevodni predstavitvi njegov singularno-generični glas, razberljiv v originalu, izgubi prepoznavnost in izginja v podtalje svetovne literature, v nepregledno gmoto neprebranega (the great unread).
Key words: world literature / globalization / late capitalism / Slovenian literary studies
In the Yugoslav kingdom, established after the nationalist-driven collapse of Austria-Hungary, and in the Socialist Federal Republic Yugoslavia, a winner over WWII Nazism and Fascism, the term Yugoslav literature supported integralism and unitarism. It suited the official state ideologies that attempted to master particularisms of the constitutive nations. The plural variant of the term, Yugoslav literatures, is a more recent compromise concept. Stemming from Leninist idea of the self-determination of nations, the plural term enabled to recognise and foster the existence of an interliterary community composed of individual literatures of Yugoslav nations and nationalities.
Surprisingly, a preliminary survey has shown that, in its fundamental works created in the first and second Yugoslavia (from Ocvirk’s Theory of Comparative Literary History of 1936 to Kos’s 1987 Comparative History of Slovenian Literature), the Slovene comparative literature avoids discussing Yugoslav literature(s), whereas it freely uses the expressions European or world literature in singular. The reasons why Slovene comparative studies persistently neglected the closest neighbourhood of Slovene literature are manifold. They range from methodological concerns (a break with the tradition of Slavic philology and a reorientation to cultural and spiritual history) through disciplinary divisions of labour with Slavic studies to ideological underpinnings (the affiliation of Slovene literature to the Western and Central Europe and distancing from the South or East). The paper will explore why the concept of Yugoslav literature(s) figured as a blind spot of Slovenian comparativism. Why it was not studied either as the closest other of the national literature nor as its historical-political context or, at least, a typological analogy?
In the 1960s and 70s, the Ljubljana student magazine Tribuna published original and imported modernist literature, (post)structuralist theory, and anti-systemic politics. The mere contiguity of these discourses on the pages of Tribuna evoked their interaction in the acts of reading. Moreover, stronger modes of interaction characterized their production and mediation, such as writers-theorists translating fresh French theory or various hybrids of theory and literature (conceptualism; modernism imitating theoretical or political discourse; neo-avant-garde manifesto or mock-manifesto; fictionalizing the front page of the magazine, etc.). Žižek’s early hybrid texts show the emergence of the theory as a parasite on the body of literature and philosophy. They “deconstructed” the author function crucial to the (national) literary institution. The scandal Žižek provoked in 1967 seems to foretell the split of the ‘68 generation on the theoretical and literary fraction in the 1970s.
Because of its position within the asymmetries of the world systems of economy, languages, and literatures, the literary translation is not only the main mode of transnational literary circulation, but also the relay for the global spread of Western geo-culture and the hegemony of its aesthetic discourse. The possibility of a particular literary text written in a “small” language to gain access to the global literary circulation depends, among other factors, on the fact whether the work in question has been translated in a global language and where and when it has been published. This will be demonstrated by the history of “worlding” the Slovenian romantic “national poet” France Prešeren.
In response to the recent pluralization of modernism, my paper will take up the above concept along with Jameson’s thesis of singular modernity to argue that modernity exists in the capitalist world-system, divided into hegemonic and dependent literary fields, only through its particular manifestations. With starting points that explain modernism beyond the normativity of the Western canon and do not overlook modernist phenomena in the so-called communist Second World, I will focus on the period of the global student movement of the 1960s and 1970s. May 1968 brought once again “the imaginative proximity of social revolution” (Perry Anderson), in which modernism was reborn and experienced its “last season” (Franco Moretti).
During the worldwide student revolt of 1968, Slovenian modernism – an in-between peripheral phenomenon within the Cold War antagonism – showed a universal characteristic of the period: its transformative impulse. The idea that literature, through its inner transformation, leads to a radical transformation of the entire social sphere inspired the program and experimental practice of Slovenian neo-avant-gardists and led to the involvement of literary life in political protest, the production of a “revolutionary literature,” (post)structuralist text theory, and the poetics of modernist literary works. Embedded in the global uprising, the innovative Slovenian trends of the 1960s and 70s synchronized with the Western centers of modernity such as Paris. Moreover, with the OHO group and the Lacanian School of Ljubljana, concepts emerged that resonated throughout the world precisely because of their specific peripheral genealogy.
With starting points that explain modernism beyond the normativity of the Western canon and do not overlook modernist phenomena in the so-called i. another world, the lecture will focus on the period of the global student movement of the sixties and seventies of the 20th century. Just as the turbulent period between the Paris Commune of 1871 and the October Revolution of 1917 stimulated the emergence of historical modernism, the years of the students' world revolution (joined in some places by the working class) renewed modernism, even if this literary and artistic direction had been academicized and commercialized by then. May 1968 once again brought "the proximity of the social revolution" (Perry Anderson), in which modernism was reborn and experienced its "last season" (Franco Moretti). The idea that literature, through its inner transformation, leads to a profound transformation of the entire social sphere (from politics to morality to lifestyle) inspired the program and experimental practice of the artistic neo-avant-gardes in those years and led to the involvement of literary life in political protest, the production of "revolutionary literature", (post)structuralist textual theory and the poetics of modernist literary works. Slovenia, as an intermediate periphery between the communist East and the capitalist West, caught up with the Paris metropolis at the end of the 1960s. What's more, the OHO group and the Lacanian School of Ljubljana gave rise to concepts that resonated throughout the world precisely because of their specific peripheral genealogy.
Nedavno je minilo trideset let, odkar je padel berlinski zid. Letnica 1989 je -- poleg letnice 1968 -- v zgodovini druge polovice 20. stoletja ena najbolj nabitih s pomenom. Predvsem pa sta vsaka s svojimi dogodki v marsičem oblikovali našo sedanjost in obzorje. Lahko bi se reklo, da letnica 1989 uteleša današnjo stvarnost, letnica 1968 pa utopijo, ki stvarnost presega. Presečišče teh dveh svetovnozgodovinskih obletnic (študentskega gibanja in padca berlinskega zidu) si je za izhodišče premišljanja vzela tudi mednarodna konferenca z naslovom "Od maja 1968 do novembra 1989: transformacije sveta, literature in teorije", ki je ob obletnici padca berlinskega zidu potekala na ZRC SAZU. Kateri so bili torej procesi, ki so v literaturi, teoriji in družbi povezali oba prelomna dogodka?
This article attempts to answer the question of whether the racist text "Surplus 5" by Aleksandar Škorec, published in the newspaper Demokracija on December 3, 2020, is indeed a satire, as the newspaper's editor claims. Compared to Swift's satire "A Modest Proposal," which on the surface displays a similar genocidal cruelty, the text "Surplus 5" does not turn out to be a satire – it does not meet the definition of this genre because the speaker's position is not ironized. In the context of other "surpluses" by the same author, the text would rather be described as a causerie, in which the author expresses his racist and ideological intolerance. //
Povzeto v: Prispevek v Demokraciji z naslovom Presežki 5 ni satira. Avtorica: Katarina Bulatović. 28. 12. 2020, Oštro, splet: https://www.ostro.si/si/razkrinkavanje/objave/prispevek-z-naslovom-presezki-5-v-demokraciji-ni-satira