Primerjalna književnost

Matevž Kos: Cankar in Nietzsche   17

Nataša Bavec: Naratološki pogledi na Musilov esejistični roman
Mož brez posebnosti   45

Univerza Lancaster

Summary: The emergence of literary theory in Eastern and Central Europe was conditional upon a process of disintegration and modification of monolithic philosophical approaches on the eve of, and immediately after, World War I. This is one of the two major ways, in which modern literary theory was born, the strongest cases being the transformation of Marxism into a theory relevant to interpreting literature in the 1920s and the 1930s, most seminally in the work of the Hungarian-Jewish thinker György (Georg) Lukács (1885-1971), and the modifications of Husserlian phenomenology in the work of the Polish theoretician Roman Ingarden (1893-1970), who rendered phenomenology pertinent to the study of the 'literary work of art'. The second venue we have to explore when discussing the birth of modern literary theory in Eastern and Central Europe is that exemplified by the collective efforts of the Russian Formalists and the Prague Linguistic Circle. The emergence of literary theory in Russia and Czechoslovakia in the 1920s-1930s followed a different path. Unlike Lukács's or Ingarden's work it did not originate in the modification of an overarching philosophical paradigm. Rather, it reflected the growing discontent with scholarly positivism, as well as – most crucially – the need to confront, make sense of, and give support, to fresh and radical modes of creative writing, which were making themselves felt in the literature of the Futurists in Russia and of the Czech, largely surrealist, avant-garde. Thus the engine of change behind literary studies was located, on the one hand, in the immanent evolution of philosophy and the dissatisfaction with traditional methodologies of literary scholarship, which by then were wearing thin beyond repair, but also, on the other hand, in the challenges stemming from the new artistic practices of the avant-garde and from the legacy of Romanticism, their most important precursor. Whatever the differences between these two scenarios, it is essential to stress the fact that in both cases the birth of modern literary theory in Eastern and Central Europe would not have been possible without a historically specific environment of heteroglossia, enhanced intercultural exchange, and border-crossing, exile being the most dramatic example thereof.

Filozofska fakulteta, Ljubljana

Summary: The primary reception of Nietzsche's philosophy in Slovene literature and culture in general was mainly ideologically and cultural. This holds true of both Catholic-conservative as well as liberal, freethinking people, who espoused the two predominant (and competing) ideological models in Slovenia at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. The Slovene relationship towards Nietzsche (and philosophy in general) was such also because, at the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, philosophical thought was not sufficiently developed and analysed to enable a qualified dialogue with Nietzschean philosophy: in Slovenia it did not have the appropriate, i.e. philosophical partner in a conversation. This is demonstrated in the Slovene – also literary – reception of Nietzsche. The reception of Nietzsche in the literature of the Slovene moderna partly overcomes the established ideological framework, although most authors avoid a more radical approach. This “duality” is shown in the literary work (Erotika, Knjiga za lahkomiselne ljudi, Kralj na Betajnovi, Kurent) of one particular author, Ivan Cankar. The most obvious of Cankar's references to Nietzsche are to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. However, Cankar's relation to Nietzsche is ambivalent. A horizon of romantic subjectivity can still be found in the background of Cankar's syntagms and formulations, which enable discussion about Nietzsche. After all, Cankar mainly understands art as an emphasised ethical instance which is most closely interrelated with so-called “life practice”. Hence the realisation that, to enter the world of Cankar's literature, Nietzschean notions such as “will”, “power”, and “superman”, must pass through the filter of humanisation. One of Cankar's words for this is tendentiousness. 

Ljubljana

Summary: Through a prism of narratology this article elucidates a special inter-generic form of narration, the essay novel, which is created through an interaction between a semi-literary, non-fiction genre, i.e. essay and its structural pre-forms, and a novel. This is a non-conventional type of novel in which its essential pre-requisite, to have a narrational structure as a succession of fictional events, is loosened and deteriorates, since the story line is interrupted by non-narrational segments, i.e. essayistic musing by the narrator and characters. The starting point of the article is the realisation that within narratology the problem of non-narrational segments – with the exception of description – remains almost un-researched within the wider narrational context. The specific internal structure of this sub-genre is therefore defined here in an empirically inductive way, through an analysis of a model of an essay novel, Musil’s Man Without Qualities, which is widely accepted as such in literary history. First, those aspects of Musil’s novel are analysed which link it with other narrational texts. Here I followed the narratological classification of such texts on three basic levels: that of story line, the text as a means of narrating a plot and that of narration as a process of producing a narrative. The non-fictional, essayistic parts of Musil’s novel are also simultaneously included in this basic narratological scheme, so that their functional interrelation with the constituent bases of the narrative is evident: the time of the story and text (an influence that essay features have on the tempo of the narrative), the narrator, literary characters and the presentation of their spoken discourse (who provides essay passages in the novel and in what verbal form these are uttered), the narrator’s focus and so on. Special attention is paid to the definition of the relation between the course of events and essay passages in the novel. It was important to see to what extent essay passages are integrated into the narrational whole, how events and essayistic parts alternate, are intertwined and linked, what ensures the coherence of the experiential and ideal world, and, most importantly, what role essay elements play in the development of the plot, where a comparison with the function of description in a novel, as defined by M. Bal, proved very useful. The function of essay in a narrative context is similar to that of description: in an explicit way it elucidate what happens in the novel, they can predict the further development of a story, sometimes cause tensions between the characters’ relationships, and therefore indirectly become an agent which triggers the action. A definition of the essential content and structural formal features of an essay or essay writing procedure and the mode of thought is also indicated, but more attention is paid to the theory developed by Peter Zima in his Textual Sociology. Central to the theory is the notion of semantically ideological ambivalence, with which specific features of essay discourse are explained and demonstrated in Musil’s novel. The article also briefly touches upon the question of how the notion of a novel’s essay-isation has been evaluated by literary science and criticism.

Summary: Syncretism is the oldest invariable of the novel. In the last decade of the 20th century the only regular novelistic feature is most visible in the contemporary Slovene novel in the genre syncretism of novelistic structures, which combines different genres.

Genre hybridism, or the interrelatedness of various novelistic genres within one novel, has balanced different narrative procedures, and by tending to have a dominant genre foundation, ‘built’ a clear storyline. Since the novel of the 1990s is a modified traditional novel, genre syncretism represents the most important transformed tendency for it, while, at the same time, it directs meta-literary paths to the novel through a multi-layered genre analysis. In the novels of young authors (born after 1958) this has pointed towards renewed positions of traditional genres (anti-utopian, horror, historical, crime, travelogue, love and socio-critical novel) and interesting novelties of this period (novels and novels of landscape fiction).

In addition to genre syncretism, there are two other important ‘transformers’ of traditional genre formulas, the non-typical position of the narrator and an increased number of spoken passages. The transformational role of the narrator with an ironical-satirical perspective introduces a new (most often post-modernist) relation between the story and the reader, while the dynamic dialogues make the modern Slovene novel more like a screenplay.

The balanced union of the traditional and contemporary novelistic features has not only promoted the flowering of the Slovene novel, but at the end of the century, and with its increased reading appeal, it has also paved the way for a new reading.

Ljubljana

Summary: The paper presents some of the most characteristic features of the literary interpretative practice called new historicism whose main purpose is to point out the mutual agency of history and literature. New historicism renders possible the generation of new perspectives on these two spheres of human activity. The paper also states that the term new historicism denotes a very extensive and heterogeneous practice. This evokes the names of the theorists like Hyden White and Otto Mink on one side, and on the other it includes the literary interpretation that is, besides Greenblatt himself – the founder of this orientation, practised also by Stephen Orgel, Catharine Gallagher, Louis Montrose and others. The paper limits itself to the work of Greenblatt, precisely to those of his texts that are focused on the phenomenon called linguistic colonialism. Particular interest is paid to the new historicist interpretations of The Tempest and more precisely to interpretations of the relationship between Prospero and Caliban. The segments of European theoretical thought (hermeneutics, Nietzsche, Foucault) on which the new historicism based its interpretative practice are pointed out briefly. In short its essence is in taking arbitrarily chosen nonliterary texts (reports, documents, journals) from their original context and confronting them with canonical literary works on one side and with a wider cultural and political context on the other. Some critical remarks provoked by the characteristic methodological mode of the new historicism are briefly considered. Its principal intention is to illustrate how Greenblatt was, in his later writings from his original postcolonial attitude that expressed itself in the treatise “Learning to curse”, unknowingly and unintentionally subject to colonial attitude and with it to colonial discourse. This means that he applied the very method of interpretative writing that beforehand he had strongly stated to be inappropriate for interpreting Shakespeare’s dramas.

Akademija za gledališče, radio, film in televizijo, Ljubljana

Summary: The article raises terminological questions relating to theatre within theatre, or the play within a the play. This structure has been part of drama since the Renaissance (the oldest example is Fulgens and Lucrece by Henry Medwall, 1512-16), although it was studied theoretically by Joachim Voigt, Erich Proebster, Robert J. Nelson, Jörge H. Kokott and Manfred Schmeling only in the second half of the 20^th century. The main source of discrepancy is the difference posed by understanding a play within a play in either its wider or narrower sense. This syntagm binds to itself any perception of a play, not only that in the theatre. The author is in favour of limiting the term to the domain of theatre and replaces it with the meaning of theatrical play, which is shown as a performance in relation to everything else taking place on stage, so that as well as the real audience, other characters acting on stage can also view it. A play within a play is then formed by four elements: the primary, central or frame play, the play within a play or theatre within theatre, a fictional audience and real audience. Semiotically, the play within a play consists of the two independent systems of the primary play and the play within the play, which is integrated within it (with its own space, time, characters and acts), where the external communication system is projected into the internal one in which it is repeated. It establishes the term theatre within theatre as a label superior to reduced categories on both levels, that of the performed text (a performance within a performance, stage within stage, part within part) as well as the text of the play (a dramatic piece within a dramatic piece, a play within a play, a comedy within a tragedy and so on). The author proposes two labels for the naming of similar non-theatrical plays: playing roles, which is the playing of various assumed social roles and identities (Amphitryons by various authors, Moliere’s Tartuffe) and a spontaneous theatrical act, which is an act of a spectacle-like nature, which suddenly occurs at some social gathering (the duel between Hamlet nd Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Jacinta’s dance in Pohujšanju v dolini šentflorjanski by Ivan Cankar).