The lecture discusses the process of inventing and imagining literature as national, i.e. the formation of a national literary canon in Slovenian poetry from the Enlightenment to Post-Romanticism. The utopian envisioning and the institutional and medial emergence of a “Slovenised” literary system was intertwined with the unification, purification, and standardization of Slovenian literary language. References to and rewritings of the topoi of Parnassus and Elysium, which were inscribed in the European cultural memory as epitomes of “classicalness,” was one of the self-regulatory strategies acquired by Slovenian poets who were active in the initial phases of “national awakening.” With it, they marked the distinction between the ethno-lingual and cultural singularity of their poetic discourse and the norms derived from ancient classics. Beginning with Prešeren’s romantic universalism, self-reference and intertextuality became even more intensely involved in comparing and competing of Slovenian verbal art with other modern European literatures, with the intention to be integrated into the emerging system of world literature.
B.05 Guest lecturer at an institute/university
COBISS.SI-ID: 33874477In a lecture to the panel "Teaching European Literature in Imperial Europe" at the prestigious American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) conference, the current research results of the project The “Slovenian” World Literature were presented and her different methodological approach to study cultural realities and multifaceted profiles of European literary system was introduced. She proposed the framework that subverts the systemic distinction between centers and peripheries and advocates the model for an analytical grasp and hermeneutical understanding of historically unavoidable asymmetries in the formation of European literatures. This model postulates a comprehensive empirical research of complex literary facts and facets of European literature in which a detailed and in-depth approach can explain the mutual intertextual phenomenology. The literary facts seen in such intricate networks of intertextual exchanges and re-accentuations attest to their character of mobility, evident instability, and constant inventive reformulation of verbal and literary matrices, which means that the identity of texts is also necessarily re-interpreted through the ever-new dissemination of literature. – The panel promoted the work of European Network for Comparative Literary Studies (ENCLS/REELC), in which she is a founding member and the web coordinator for the official web pages hosted by ZRC SAZU.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 34498861Through books and magazines as its main media, literature helps create the networks of cultural spaces. Books are not merely the material bearers of texts, but also cultural products or even artifacts and symbols with their own history, codes, value, and meaning. Together with the textual worlds of literature, into which the semiospheres of their contexts are inscribed, books are factors in the interactive and processualformation of cultural identities. They are the memory and archive of a given culture, as well as its virtual windows into the world. With their economy, books and literature are mediators of cultural spaces: they materially and mentally establish both their “inner” coherence and continuity as well as their “outer” or “transnational” integration. The transfer of books and their systematic collection, cataloguing, analysis, commentary, and interpretation – all of these are factors that have shaped the history of the cosmopolitan awareness and consequently also the modern “system” of world literature.
C.01 Editorial board of a foreign/international collection of papers/book
COBISS.SI-ID: 49270626