This thematic issue of Slavističa revija is dedicated to the aim of centering interest on questions related to the development of mutual influences between (socio) geographical space and Slovene literature, or literary culture. In the present context, which links literature and geography in an interdisciplinary research, space is understood primarily as a complex of natural, physical, economic, political, administrative, and demographic structures. This does not imply that we are dealing with a deterministic understanding of geographic space, although we assume that space is one of chief factors in literary culture’s distribution and dynamics. When considering the relation between space and literature, it is likewise impossible to overlook the reverse influences that affect the role of literature’s discursive practices and its influence on (social) geographic space, which can be summed up with the question of how literature has—through texts, symbolic representations, imaging, and practices—influenced the apprehension, experience, study, and modeling (of regions, landscapes, peripheries, and centers) of the ethnically Slovene space.
C.01 Editorial board of a foreign/international collection of papers/book
COBISS.SI-ID: 50398818This thematic section of the journal Primerjalna književnost, titled “The Spatial Turn in Literary Studies,” features fifteen articles that explain the history, ideological, and cultural context, manifestations, and meanings of the “spatial turn” that occurred in the humanities and social sciences at the end of the 1980s and enthroned geography for the first time as a general exporter of ideas. Which new horizons—if any at all—has the spatial turn opened up for literary studies to date and what else does it promise? What relationship does spatial epistemology enter into with temporality and narrativity, which have provided traditional foundations for literary history? What can be discovered by mapping and analyzing the relations between the geographical spaces that literature socially lives in and extends into, and the spaces depicted in textual worlds? What does observation that selects a specific historically connected geographical area (i.e., a city, region, continent, or even entire world) as its main object contribute to literary history by discussing this area in all of the diversity, interconnections, and conflicting nature of its cultural languages? How can literary representations be used to explore the social experience of actual places and landscapes? How were older and modern cartographic techniques used in literary geography? Does it even make sense to map literature today?
C.01 Editorial board of a foreign/international collection of papers/book
COBISS.SI-ID: 36592941The paper treats the network of memorials or memorial landmarks of Slovene literary culture, which began forming in the middle of the nineteenth century and yet today powerfully marks the Slovene territories’ cultural landscape. The first part of the paper reviews historical models for the formation of such networks, which can be understood as the semiotic appropriation of (national) space connected with the canonization of a handful of prominent »cultural saints« and numerous men of letters of lesser stature. Then the partial results of a GIS project to map Slovene literary memorials are appraised, along with its methodological challenges and possible contributions to a better understanding of the spaces of Slovene literary culture.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 36369965The website The Space of Slovenian Literary Culture connects literary studies and geography in a interactive way. Using the Geographic Information System (GIS), it presents the development of mutual influences between the ethnically Slovenian geographic space and Slovenian literature. The website covers the period 1780–1940, showing how the literary discourse in Slovenian was able to manifest itself in public dominantly through the formation, territorial expansion, and concentration of the social network of literary actors and media, the persistent references of literary texts to places that were recognized by addressees as Slovenian, and by marking the ethnoscape by a network of memorials to Slovenian writers. By making use of GIS, the project maps and spatially analyzes statistically relevant data: life trajectories and memorials of 323 writers and other actors in literary culture; locations of 97 print media, 40 printers and publishing houses, 58 reading societies, 43 theaters and national homes and 1.676 memorials to writers. In addition to dynamic maps and graphs of the spatial evolution of the Slovenian literary culture, the website includes sample mapping of spaces represented in 40 historical novels. PSLK includes a selection of biographies and maps from the Literary Atlas of Ljubljana, 28 published articles of the project team and links to similar projects across the world. The main tool of PSLK is a searching interface which makes possible for users to generate interactive maps in real time by selecting search criteria and time-span. The maps represent the following layers: persons (writers, editors, critics, etcv.), memorials (sculptures, author’s houses, etc.), theaters and national homes, publishing houses and printers, and periodicals.
C.07 Other editorial board
Addressing the poetics of spatiality in Duino Elegies of R.M. Rilke and in Karst poems of Srečko Kosovel, the paper discusses the articulation of the spatial and the inherent modernist element of poetic dislocation in their representations. Manifested as an art of mood or thought through ascetic images of modernist terrains, austere qualities in scenery and fairly scarce, strict, unemotional outlines of Karst and Duino, their poems frame emblematic metaphors inaugurating modernist poetics and, in fact, highlight the very spatiallogic and selfreflexivity of modernist diction. Actually, spatialism embodies an attempt to capture movement and time in the poem, and its main goal is to grasp into its representations "real space of the world", "the realm of reality". As a result, also landscapes in Rilke and Kosovel appear to be rather vague or elusive entities. — Landscape in modernist art seems to be in the state of being dissociated, it appears to be present only through its segments, as a fragmented entity, and thus the concept of postulated, hypothetical or conceptual landscapes is more applicable to the problem of modernist literature, conveying "thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season", as said in the closing verse of Eliot's Gerontion, or, in The Hollow Men V, "Between the idea/ And the reality/ Between the motion/ And the act".
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 33025581