This article proceeds from the findings of the German sociologist Georg Simmel, who claimed that every city is "individualized" by its residents. Slovenian writers do the same with Ljubljana through their professional, cultural, and political activity, and direct or indirect depictions of the city in their literary works. This process is illustrated by Ivan and Izidor Cankar, Vladimir Bartol, Edvard Kocbek, and Vitomil Zupan. These examples form the basis for developing a typology of the relationship between Slovenian writers and Ljubljana.
COBISS.SI-ID: 50800994
Literary works as discursive articulation of the experience of residing in a space are becoming a legitimate subject of geographic inquiry. Postmodern geography also has adopted for its purposes some concepts from literary studies, such as intertextuality and landscape as text or geographic imagination. A qualitative analysis of selected examples of literary texts that thematize the space of Slovene Istria shows how topophilia, the Self/other identity distinction, and feelings of place and placelessness take shape in them. These are contemporary concepts of humanistic geography, which build on the predominantly objectivist, natural and social science tradition by taking into account individual and group apprehension, imagination, and formation of space. Literary works enable geography to analyze our relation to our living environs and the meanings that we attribute to the space or identify ourselves with. Our relations to space are also a fundamental condition for forming identities and societal responsibility.
COBISS.SI-ID: 50403170
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 spatial-logic and self-reflexivity 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".
COBISS.SI-ID: 34498605