The book discusses the correspondence between Jernej Kopitar, a co-founder of Slavic studies and proponent of Austro-Slavism, and Baron Žiga Zois, an Austrian nobleman and patron of the Slovene national revival. The author treats their letters (composed between 1808−19), which are for the most part unpublished, both as historical sources and as texts. In the first part of the book, he situates them in history and within the genre of the letter, especially in the context of Classical and Enlightenment epistolography; in the second, he deals with their importance for the development of Slavic cultural nationalisms; in particular, he argues that this correspondence successfully bound Slovene, Czech, Polish, Dalmatian, Croatian, and Serbian literati into a Slavic “Republic of Letters”.
COBISS.SI-ID: 39576621
This article looks at cultural studies as an alternative to literary studies. To cofound cultural studies, Stuart Hall had to abandon literary studies. Later development, however, enabled cultural studies itself to engulf literary studies. Today, with radical approaches such as Franco Moretti’s distant reading, literary studies has itself started to approach cultural studies. But it is no longer the dominant kind of cultural studies; it is something much closer to Hall’s initial project. For Moretti proposes a repoliticization similar to Hall’s intervention, thus effectively following up on Hall’s own critique of the depoliticized cultural studies that came to dominate early cultural studies as well as literary studies. At stake, then, is not only literary studies vis-à-vis cultural studies but the politics of cultural studies itself.
COBISS.SI-ID: 40324141
Despite its postmodern articulation, the spatial turn is productive for literary studies because, paradoxically revisiting Kant’s modern attempt to base the structure of knowledge on the presumably scientific character of geography and anthropology, it has improved methods of historical contextualization of literature through the dialectics of ontologically heterogeneous spaces. The author discusses three recent appropriations of the spatial thought in literary studies: the modernization of traditional literary geography in the research of the relations between geospaces and fictional worlds (Piatti, Westphal), the systematic analysis of the genre development and diffusion with the help of analytical cartography (Moretti), and the transnational history of literary cultures (Valdés, Neubauer, Domínguez, etc.). In conclusion, the author presents the results of the research project “The Space of Slovenian Literary Culture: Literary History and the GIS-Based Spatial Analysis,” which might represent a matrix for further developments of the spatially-oriented literary science. Using GIS technologies, the project maps and analyzes data about the media, institutions, and actors of Slovenian literature in order to explain how the interaction between “spaces in literature” and “literature in spaces” has historically established a nationalized and esthetically differentiated literary field.
COBISS.SI-ID: 38103341
For a century and half, the life and work of the Slovenian–Croatian poet Stanko Vraz (1810–1851) has aroused mutually irreconcilable interpretations in Slovenian literary history and Slovenian public. These ambiguous receptions usually ranged between praising Vraz as a visionary Styrian poet and dismissing him as a “national renegade.” On one side, the Slovenian reception of Vraz centered on his decision to abandon writing in Slovenian and to embrace Shtokavian Croatian. On the other side, Vraz was an internationally acclaimed Illyrian poet and romantic Pan-Slav that almost single-handedly kindled the flame for the Slovenian national rebirth in pre-March Lower Styria. Moreover, Slovenian literary historiography adds to his ambiguous status by treating him as a unique and often tragic figure. Despite his mythicized role, Stanko Vraz in nacionalizem (Stanko Vraz and Nationalism) depicts Vraz from another angle—as a symptom of these processes rather than as their main protagonist. To achieve this task, the book offers a new contextualization of Vraz’s practice and provides a new look at the Slovenian posthumous reception of the poet.
COBISS.SI-ID: 286506752
The Baroque period confraternities in Ljubljana, as the capital of Carniola, published dozens of books, first in Latin, later in German and Slovenian, to offer as present to their members. The article presents records of some 30 books of this kind from the 17th and 18th centuries and outlines some common features of their content and genres. The Jesuit confraternity of the Assumption published several works of theological and spiritual content aimed at advancing the personal religious life of their members, as well as promoting their education. Among them are the very first editions, in Slovenian lands, of classical Christian authors, such as Boethius, St. Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas a Kempis. The material researched in this article demonstrates the activity of the Baroque confraternities in three different roles within the literary system: the roles of author, publisher and reader, which is a unique achievement in the Slovenian history of books and literature.
COBISS.SI-ID: 41018157