This monograph by the literary historian Tone Smolej forms part of the research into the cultural contacts between Slovenians and Austrians. It discusses 45 Slovenian writers who studied at the Faculties of Arts, Law or Medicine at Vienna University from the late 19th century to the mid-1920s. The first part sheds light on their years as students in Vienna, drawing on numerous and so far unknown documents from the University of Vienna Archives. Smolej examines in detail their memories of their Vienna professors, as well as the extent to which each writer’s studies influenced his later literary creativity. This study significantly contributes to the cultural and literary history of Slovene intellectuals as well as to the history of the University of Vienna and other colleges in Vienna.
COBISS.SI-ID: 281683456
The book studies translation between different languages in light of their position within the global language system (Heilbron 1999) and presents differences that occur when we translate from hyper-central, central, semi-peripheral and peripheral languages into another peripheral language, namely Slovene. The authors find that the position of the language influences all stages of the translation process, from the translation policy (choosing the text for translation and deciding whether to translate it directly or via a third language) to the financing of the translation and even individual translation strategies on the micro-level. After presenting the global language system, the book explores the dynamics of translation between different language pairs holding different positions within the language system, provides case studies of changing translation strategies in translations from different languages into Slovene, and, in its final chapter, emphasizes the central position a mother tongue has for its native speakers regardless of its position in the global language system, as, for them, it is the basis for all text comprehension and text formation in any language.
COBISS.SI-ID: 282643712
In his epic poem Pfaff vom Kahlenberg, published 1850, Anastasius Grün uses an idiosyncratic reception of the German comical literature of the Late Medieval Period and a depiction of the historical ritual of enthronement of the Dukes of Carinthia to criticize the social situation of the restoration period and to present his politically liberal ideas in a more or less hidden way. The transfer of oppositional ideas into the fictive world of literature and into the historical sphere of ancient traditions grants him a distanced position to the current historical conditions of the time.
COBISS.SI-ID: 57939042
C. K. Stead's novel Talking about O'Dwyer is a complex narrative mixture of realistic and metafictional elements on several levels. One of the narrative levels of the novel refers to World War II, when Donovan O'Dwyer as a Pakeha - a white New Zealander and commanding officer in the Maori' battalion of the New Zealand division, loses one of his men in the battle for Crete. The Maori Joe Panapa dies in unclear circumstances, which causes his family to pronounce a curse - a makutu - on O'Dwyer. The novel is important as an indictment of war per se, showing it to be a collective madness having consequences for the life destinies of every single individual caught in it. World War II and the independence war in Croatia in the 1990s are minutely described and juxtaposed: both brought to the people, as all wars do, suffering and death, and have radically changed and marked their lives and relationships.
COBISS.SI-ID: 59219810
The article focuses on the rhetorics of memory and the cultural memorial functions of selected fictional historical narratives by Stefan Zweig, an Austrian best-selling author in exile. The analysis, based on the concepts of narratology of cultural memory (E. Erll), shows that Zweig's fictional historical narratives from the 1920's and 1930's contain a variety of memorial rhetorics. In the against-war narratives, experiential modality prevails, in Stenstunden der Menscheit and in biographical narratives like Joseph Fouché and Maria Stuart that of anthagonism. Most significant in S. Zweig’s historical fiction is the narrative inscription of alternatives and opposites in cultural memories and critical reflection on them.
COBISS.SI-ID: 21458696