In this article, Jernej Habjan offers a synoptic reading of Franco Moretti’s history of the European novel and Rastko Močnik’s history of the European nation-state in order to trace and comparatively read a set of modern texts on the key relationship of so-called pre-modern kinship communities, the “joking relationships” between uncles and nephews: Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew (Le Neveu de Rameau, ca. 1761–1774), Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, 1851–1852), Louis Althusser’s The Future Lasts Forever (L’avenir dure longtemps, 1985), and Jacques-Alain Miller’s Lacan’s Nephew (Le Neveu de Lacan, 2003).
COBISS.SI-ID: 39243309
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 tentative 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
The paper presents life and work of Janez Ludvik Schönleben as it is outlined in archival sources or in his preserved printed works and manuscripts. It highlights each period of his life: his family, his education with the Jesuits in Ljubljana, his 18-year-long education and activity in the Jesuit order (1635–1653), his exit from the order, and his PhD in theology in Padua. His work as the Dean of the Cathedral in Ljubljana (1654–1667) is presented along with the period of his post as the Archdeacon of Lower Carniola and parish priest in Ribnica, and his final years in Ljubljana (1676–1681). Next to his life, the paper outlines also his extensive body of work.
COBISS.SI-ID: 38460461
The article deals with the art of improvisation in literature and music. With reference to two highly elaborate contemporary forms of improvisation - poetry of Basque bertsolaris and jazz - it explores the possibilities for comparing the improvisational practices within the two artistic disciplines.
COBISS.SI-ID: 58097762
Since it was published in September 2006, Jonathan Littell's internationally bestselling novel The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes) has been subjected to controversies: affirmative opinions are in sharp contrast with the explicitly unfavourable ones. These are especially troubled by the fact that the writer has chosen the perspective of a Nazi criminal for writing on Holocaust and Nazi Germany, and not of a victim. After a brief outline of international and Slovene reception of the novel I address two questions in my contribution: the question of whether Littell's protagonist Max Aue, a mass murderer and literary cultivated intellectual, supposed murderer of his mother and step-father and an incestuous brother, and at the same time also the first-person narrator, who forms the narration on the duality of history and fiction, can be a convenient medium for reminiscing about Holocaust; the second question is whether he might subvert the conventions of the historical novel which The Kindly Ones are based on. I also discuss some broader backgrounds of the questions which transcend the field of literary studies and include ethical, cultural, and historical aspects.
COBISS.SI-ID: 59249506