World literature is a global phenomenon that is present through a multitude of local variants. Each national literature has created a specifically "glocalized" version of the world's literature. These versions are materialized in the book traffic, libraries, translations, academic canon, and the repertoires of referential works that have been most inspiring for a particular local tradition. However, this plurality of world literatures is superdetermined by a single, but unequal world literary system and its centers and peripheries. Studies of Slovenian and foreign authors collected in this book analyze the relations of Slovenian literature to ideas and practices of world literature showing them in the comparative context of other small or peripheral literatures of Europe.
COBISS.SI-ID: 263955712
Juvan’s book explores the asymmetrical relations between a peripheral literary field, such as that of Slovenia, and the world literary system. After offering a history of the idea of world literature and commenting on the evolution of its practices from Goethe to today’s globalization and transnationalism, the author focuses on the notion that Slovenian literature sacrificed its intrinsic individualism and artistic function because of its 19th-century engagement in the national movement. It was thus supposed to suffer from aesthetic insufficiency, underdevelopment, collectiveness and belatedness. This frustrating self-image evolved from comparisons of Slovenian literature with Western cultural centers, whereby Slovenian letters were mistakenly seen by its actors as a unique case. With reference to the Slovenian “national poet” France Prešeren (1800–1849), this generalizing notion has been termed the “Prešernian structure.”
COBISS.SI-ID: 264144640
The focal point of the article is to revise judgments and thoughts about European cultural realities, to rethink the facts of cultural identities as well as views on European literary corpuses and literary canons from a fluid, postnational perspective that is well aware of the role of otherness and recognizes any cultural identity as being continually engaged in a dynamics and a dialogical relationship with several other ties. Promoting methodological paradigm of the intercultural existence of literature, the article reconsiders the idea of European literary system from the perspective of transnational and cross-cultural paradigm of literary existence. It argues for the necessity to analytically understand the factuality of cultural spaces, to hermeneutically read literary phenomena and their historical reality in the complexity of semiotic traces, in real subtleties of formal and textual deposits, and in multifaceted links of poetological impacts.
COBISS.SI-ID: 34498093