Projects / Programmes
Intercultural Literary Studies
January 1, 2014
- December 31, 2018
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 6.07.00 |
Humanities |
Literary sciences |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| H390 |
Humanities |
General and comparative literature, literary criticism, literary theory |
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| 6.02 |
Humanities |
Languages and Literature |
Researchers (27)
Organisations (2)
Abstract
In the future, the research will address important anniversaries of major writers (Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare) and significant personalities (Bertha von Suttner), who greatly contributed to European and world thought. As they represented the moving force of their time, literature and intercultural literary studies can in the world of increasingly intensive exchanges between cultures and individuals contribute important knowledge that makes easier mutual cooperation, increases international mobility and migrations, while strengthening intercultural awareness on all levels of contemporary society. The group knows that literary science has to respond more efficiently than traditional concepts to the erosion of personal and collective identities in the period of greater transcultural connectivity, characteristic of the 21st century. In this framework, the dissemination of ideas and discourses, connected with literature and culture (i.e. »the literary osmosis«) and their study, is set forth in the research programme.
The research field covered by interculturality is vast, which can be seen from the heterogeneity of the group, for researchers work in English literary studies, American studies, German literary studies, translation studies, Slavonic studies, Slovenian and comparative literature, and research literary interculturality in contact between cultures in the English/American and German-speaking areas, between the South and West-Slavonic literatures.
The research programme is partly dedicated to study fields that were in the centre of attention in the previous period (mediation of literatures and cultures, literatures in direct intercultural contacts and literary-aesthetic research), but it will primarily be directed at new questions, as well as reinterpretations in the light of new findings. Research will be put into the context of contemporary socio-economic and scientific context in which the axis of research on the global level is slowly being shifted from the centre to the periphery, to new languages, states and cultures, in the world and in Europe. Research focuses on five basic fields:
1) literary-theoretical discourse (intercultural hermeneutics, phenomenological theories, imagology);
2) analysis of the literary field (analysis of contexts and literary conventions, literary-historical aspects, reception, literatures in direct intercultural and transcultural contacts, canonization);
3) narratives of the foreign(the other and one's own, and the aesthetics/poetics of the foreign);
4) translation as intercultural mediation and translation of marginalized literatures into Slovenian (indirect translations, the role of central languages, cultural specificities);
5) didactics and the development of intercultural and reading competences (the research of literature as a polyvalent phenomenon touching upon burning social issues, raising the awareness of problematic issues, empirical analyses of the reception of foreign literature).
Significance for science
The rise of natural, technical and social disciplines has over the past few decades led to the sharpening and narrowing of criteria in scientific activity, and thus also to the marginalization of humanist and hermeneutic traditions, which only partly adhere to these criteria.Literary science has found itself faced with a seemingly insoluble dilemma: by adopting the methods of empirical sciences it risks the loss of autonomy and identity, by insisting on hermeneutic standpoints, however, it risks marginalization and a detachment from the scientific paradigm. The solution of the problem has to be sought in the holistic doing away with the asymmetry of value: the humanities must follow the example of empirical sciences in those dimensions that are the most effective ones (pragmatic synthesis of theoreticism, empiricism and application). At the same time it has to make good use of the potentials of self-reflexive and multi-perspective thinking. Hermeneutic thinking can namely provide a holistic literary study approach and thus upgrade empirical studies about biological, cognitive, social and cultural contexts of literary communication. Literature itself is a foreign element in its own culture (Wintersteiner), which is why its study and the study of intercultural communication enables an easier and better decoding of the foreign in society, understanding of relationships, politics, economy, and the like.
Moreover, the research of the group members will significantly broaden theoretical standpoints in the study of Slovenian diasporic/emigrant literature and from the Slovenian perspective upgrade postcolonial critical approaches. From the point of view of intercultural or interlingual mediation within the research topics, it exposes the problem of the dynamics of word-switching and anomalies in contact between English/German/South-Slavonic/Scandinavian and Slovenian fiction, which has so far not been enough systematically researched. Research will contribute new knowledge in the field of emotion research, space perception and cultural transfer and to a great extent help to a greater sensibility and tolerance in intercultural dialogue in real life and thus contribute to a better understanding in the contacts between peripheral literatures themselves and the intermediary role of central cultures in these contacts on the global level, for Slovenian researchers have a better chance in observing them »from within« than researchers from central (European) cultures.
Significance for the country
During the past decades it has become evident that through fragmentation, particularization and the medialization of cultural milieus cognitive capabilities to establish coherent, self-reflexive and adaptable structures are weakening, although are key in an independent orientation in dynamic social changes. Literary study and its descriptions of the complex experience of being, based on scientific-theoretical and historical analysis and self-reflexion importantly contribute to coherence, self-reflexivity, stability and cooperation between all social actors. We have to be aware that liberalist capitalism is on the wane and there are new societies and orders in view. Humanist thought has in similar circumstances always taken the leading role. From a discursive-historical aspect it is literature that importantly participates in the constitution and the changing of culture and society. In Slovenia too, literature has proven to be a linking and state-forming element, which is why it is all the more important to dedicate ouselves to research in the context of intercultural and literary studies and thus strengthen the idea of intercultural communication.
Literature is a multi-layered phenomenon, which qualitatively and quantitatively help to form individual, cultural and national identity. As the role of belles-lettres is marginalized throughout Europe, the monopoly of technological media, however, changes the reader profile into a searcher of internet data, it is necessary to give back literature and literary history an adequate place in society. We must know, and use it to our own advantage, that communication today takes place through mass media, espacially electronic ones, which questions the existence of a classic book form and its public; on the other hand the very age of digital literacy open up numerous new possibilities, since literature, scientific findings and ideas reach the final consumer much earlier than before.
The social importance of the research programme is in the intertwining of the topics of interculturality, literary and cultural transfer in the study processes at universities at home and abroad, international promotion of original Slovenian textbook literature and the profiling of its inter- and transcultural identity. The researchers will present their findings at home and internationally, for they actively participate in international discussions about relevant themes and thus contribute to (the qualitatively best and cheapest) promotion of Slovenia in European research space. They share their knowledge about other cultures in Slovenian space and strengthen the intercultural competences of Slovenian recipients. This has positive effects in contacts with foreign partners in the cultural, technical and economic level and diplomacy, which contributes to the solidification of inter-state cooperation and also to the knowledge of otherness, and the strengthening of tolerance and acceptance.
Most important scientific results
Annual report
2014,
2015,
final report
Most important socioeconomically and culturally relevant results
Annual report
2014,
2015,
final report
