Because of their relative wealth (which was also due to their proverbial frugality), Upper Carniolans were more literarily active than their fellow countrymen in neighboring provinces, although not to the extent that one could speak of a special regional type of literature. Among the narrative genres, Upper Carniola is specifically characterized by the Alpine story (Josip Vandot and Janez Jalen), and prominent Upper Carniolans such as Jernej Kopitar, France Prešeren, Janez Bleiweis, Simon Jenko, and Jakob Aljaž have been the subject of biographical novels.
B.06 Other
COBISS.SI-ID: 49258850Semiotic interventions of literature into the geographic space are not limited to the level of texts. The literary cultures reshape the actual spaces as well, as they are helped by the network of memorial sites (“mnemotopes”). Such networks marked the geographic spaces of European cultures especially after the end of the eighteenth century when the cultural nationalism started spreading over the continent. Their treatment in this paper has a twofold motivation. On the one hand, it is stimulated by a study of canonization of national poets and other “cultural saints” that has exposed space as an important element. For the wide network of remembrance sites only enables proper ritual veneration of cultural saints—as can be, for example, well demonstrated by commemorative cults of national poets . Spatial dimensions of canonization turned out to be crucial not only from the viewpoint of the “management” of collective memory and the shaping of a (new) community and its common imaginary, but also from the perspective of the (nationalist) symbolic conquest and appropriation of the actual territory. On the other hand, the GIS-mapping of literary monuments has clearly shown that the focus on the core canonic authors is too narrow. Only in combination of a large number of marginal, often only locally interesting authors, and a handful of canonized “greats”, the proper network of mnemotopes is formed that impregnates the formerly “virgin” geographic space with the dense grid of (literary) associations and connotations, subduing it to (semiotic) nationalization. In many respects, it is possible to draw analogies between the network of medieval saintly shrines, around which the (unified) space of “Christian Europe” was constituted, and the mnemotopes of cultural saints that redefined the (heterogeneous) semiotic spaces of the “Europe of nations.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 34679853This 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: 50398818