THEORY OF LITERATURE

The monograph Something in the Mist over the River or Literary Interpretation of Texts by Alojzija Zupan Sosič examines the concepts of interpretation, reading and analysis, and the directions of literary interpretation in the 20th and 21st centuries. Seventeen interpretative practices are presented; in defining and classifying the interpretations, the book is innovative to the greatest extent, because it describes even the unknown areas of Slovenian literary science (already established in some places in the world), for example, affective hermeneutics, cogmotion approach, queer theory. New knowledge in the first part is connected with a critical assessment of already established categories and their latest additions. Since the scientific monograph deals with the literary interpretation of all three genders, it acts as a fundamental work in the field of literary interpretation in Slovenia, also welcome because it combines new areas in a pioneering way

The scientific monograph The Theory of Narratives by Alojzija Zupan Sosič was created as a synthesis of an authentic almost twenty-year long systematic study of narrative texts. In the monograph, the author takes a detailed look at the knowledge of classical and post-classical narratology, while respecting, critically judging and even supplementing the most recent insights of foreign theoreticians and verifying their usability in concrete analyzes and interpretations of literary texts. Alojzija Zupan Sosič’s narrative theory is almost entirely devoted to narrative in literature, although the author also starts from the assumption that narrative, based on storytelling as a universal human activity, is not exclusively a characteristic of literary texts. Alojzija Zupan Sosič’s monograph represents an innovation in Slovenian literary science and as such can be considered a a fundamental work of it. In the monograph, the author unifies for the first time the central concepts for the analysis and interpretation of narratives and the methodological origins from which these concepts were formed.

Based on the study of the domestic and foreign state of the field of classical and post-classical narratology, as evidenced by her extensive list of domestic and foreign literature, her own original additions, proposals and solutions, as well as reflections on what is significant from the point of view of theory and applicability for researchers and readers of narratives, Alojzija Zupan Sosič divided the contents of the monograph into 157 chapters.

The monograph offers numerous new insights and the author’s original solutions. Among the most innovative chapters are the ones in which she discusses the narrator, the mediation of speech, and narrative feelings. For example, the author synthesized the knowledge of the unreliable narrator and added to it the possibility of an unreliable reader and when describing it, she warned of enigmatic descriptions, she also added the mediation of speech to textual means, etc. The originality and uniqueness of the monograph is also represented by the glossary. Thoughtfully and in accordance with contemporary narratological and ethical principles, examples of literary texts from the corpus of neglected genders, social classes or nationalities were often chosen.

prof. dr. sc. Jožica Čeh Steger

Igor Žunkovič’s monograph critically examines and systematises evolutionary-theoretical approaches to the understanding of literature, which mostly draw from philosophical and scientific theories of the second half of the 20th century, especially from cognitive science and (especially) evolutionary psychology. One of the features of Žunkovič’s monograph is that – although the author expresses his conviction and arguments in support of the so-called literary Darwinist approach  –  for all four fundamental directions, it shows that they do not completely exhaust the science of literature. The author develops a distinctly interdisciplinary point of view of contemporary humanities that he intertwines with the theory of evolution, cognitive psychology and neuroscience, but does not get lost in the broad spectrum because he focuses on the meaning of certain scientific disciplines and their claims for understanding literature, while emphasizing that evolutionary approaches to literature are only useful if they place literature at the center of their interest and do not see it only as a means of their own self-affirmation.

The book titled Jewish Sextets by Prof. Vid Snoj, PhD, comprises essays on six modern Jewish authors: Gershom Scholem, Erich Auerbach, Franz Werfl, Lev Shestov and Franz Kafka. The modernist literature, broadly speaking, from the Enlightenment onwards, has been featured by the „Jewish emersion“ in the areas of science and spiritual teachings, art, music and literature. The common interpretation of the exceptional achievements of Jewish people in all these areas is attributed to the opening of ghettos, simultaneously leading to the cessesion of the fixation on the holy scriptures and the banishment of depicting the image of the God, and so on. For example, it is obvious that, from the point of Christianity, the choseness of the Jews ended in the area of religion. The choseness then extended into the art which, on the other hand, resurfaces as a realm of epiphany of what is – or as a space of a-phany, un-utterencing, obliteration, nothingness, replacing thus the religion. The creative work by the Jews in the real world almost throughout their history, not only in the modernist literature, has been emerging from the deep and spiritual experiencing of the chosen ones and the exile, the chosenness on earth and the exile from the worldly places. This experience brings Jewish people into a particular position – being countryless in a country; being chosen for the world but homeless.

The book before you, Arrogance and Bias, by the author prof. Matevž Kos is divided into three major topical ranges. The first brings five comprehensive interpretations of the most famous books, or rather poetic opuses, by Slovenian poets who put a significant stamp onto the 1990s. The first one, Sonnet as a Form of Recuperation from the Contemporary, is devoted to the breakthrough collection of more recent Slovenian poetry – Sonnets by Milan Jesih. Today this book has a reputation of being the pinnacle of post-modernism in contemporary Slovenian poetry. The second essay, Cracked Words, is a comprehensive contemplation on the poetry by Veno Taufer, one of the central authors of so-called Slovenian “dark modernism”. The next text – Genealogy of Loneliness – is dedicated to the book of poetry by Jure Porokar, Objects in the Void, while the essay A Woman, a Light and a Scorpion is dedicated to the poetry by Uroš Zupan, the leading author among young Slovenian poets. Essays Imperfective Verb To Be is contemplation on another breakthrough collection of contemporary Slovenian poetry – Limping Sonnets by Milan Dekleva. The second part of the book is mainly of theoretical and literary-historical nature. This is a comprehensive treatise titled Contemporary Slovenian Poetry and the Issue of Postmodernism which analyses and sets the question of the direction of the issue of postmodernism phenomenon in poetry (especially Slovenian poetry), if it exists at all, as by worldly standards the discussion on postmodernism usually revolves around prose and drama.

The third part of the book is (slightly provocatively) called Troubles with the Programme. By its primary intonation the text is critical and polemical, while the central question it sets is the relationship between the literature and ideology, between the culture and politics, as risen during the critical age of Slovenian process of becoming independent and democratized. Among others, the author pleads for a rigid differentiation of various levels – above all the state interference and immanent poetic practice, author and text. Hence the critical attitude to various theoretical and ideological “discourses” which have been seen as something conservative or ethical and morally non-binding over the past decade in young Slovenian poetry.

 

The book Experimenting with Nietzsche, subtitled “Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism in Slovenian Literature”, is divided into three parts. The first part, “Nietzsche”, is an introductory survey complemented with occasional philosophical interpretation. It attempts to follow the inner logic of Nietzsche´s philosophy by examining its focal points constantly underlining the open and ambiguous structure of his work. The second part of the book, “Nietzsche after Nietzsche”, begins by addressing the historical reception of Nietzsche´s philosophy and the different, often opposing, interpretations and “readings”. Using the methods of literary history, it goes on to discuss the impact of Nietzsche´s philosophy on the formation of literary movements at the turn of the century and later, concentrating on the German Expressionism. The third and central part is entitled “Nietzsche and Slovenian Literature”. It presents and analyses the first responses to Nietzsche´s Philosophy in the late 19th century Slovenian press and in the subsequent period until World War I. The central chapters are dedicated to the “dialogue” of Slovenian literature with Nietzsche´s philosophy in two historical settings: in the years between 1890 and 1914, and the period between the two wars. The author concludes that Nietzsche was viewed in Slovenia primarily from an ideological perspective and, more often than not, rejected by booth leading Slovenian political powers of the time, the Catholics and the Liberals. One of the reasons for such reception was that Slovenia had no developed philosophy in the true sense of the word at the time, and thus Nietzsche could not be met on an dequate, i.e. philosophical, ground. The reception of his philosophy through the decades until the Second World War was primarily reflected in literature and base on ideological considerations. The most important Slovenian writers discussed are Ivan Cankar (1876-1918) and Oton Župančič (1878-1949), both belonging to the Slovenian “Modernism [moderna], as well as Ivo Šorli (1877-1958), Fran Albreht (1889-1963), an Anton Novačan (1887-1951), who inherited the Modernist traditions from the years preceding, and partly following, World War I. The next period is represented by poet Srečko Kosovel (1904-1926), avant-garde artis Anton Podbevešek (1898-1981), critic Josip Vidmar (1895-1992), and writer Vladimir Bartol (1903-1967). Each formed an individual response to Nietzsche´s philosophy, the most radical ones being Vidmar and Bartol, who were with out doubt geavily influenced by the philosopher in the twenties and thirties. Bartol´s novel Alamut, which bears a quotation from Nietzsche as its motto, is considered to be the most radical embodiment of “metaphysical nihilism” in pre-war Slovenian literature. The period after World War II was not in favour on Nietzsche´s philosophy, primarily for ideological reasons, and it was not until the sixties that a renewed interest in his philosophy emerged. This phenomenon took place not only in literature, but also in literary theory and philosophy, being influenced to some degree by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and his analyses of Nietzsche and the “European nihilism”.

A book by Dr Metevž Kos titled Fragments on the Wholeness: Attempts with Slovenian Poetry comprises seven essays dedicated to (post)modern Slovenian poetry of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. The first two are contemplations on the initiators of modernism in poetry, i.e. members of the historical Slovenian avantgarde – Srečko Kosovel (1904-1926) and Anton Podbevšek (1898-1981). In the third essay the author contemplates about the opus of Veno Taufer (1933), one of the most prominent Slovenian modernist poets in the post-war era. The next essay is devoted to the collection of poems called Sonets (1989) by Milan Jesih (1950) who is renowned as a paradigmatic example of post-modernism in Slovenian poetry. The book was called after an essay about poetry by Milan Dekleva (1946). Dekleva, along with Milan Jesih, is one of the most important contemporary Slovenian poets, while both are considered representatives of the second “modernist generation” that witnessed “the crisis of modernism”. In the essay Dekleva’s opus is settled in the context of rebellious student generation of ’68, Heidegger’s post-metaphysical philosophy and eastern-oriented system of thinking – all of that left trace on Dekleva’s poetry. The essay How do we Speak When We Dare to Speak? is dedicated to the poetry by Uroš Zupan (1963), the most respectable Slovenian poet of middle generation. The last text in the book The Last Crossroad to Parnas is a synthetic rendering of the “young Slovenian poetry” from the period 1990-2005.

A White Lady in the Labyrinth: a Conceptual World of J.L.Borges is a monography about the eminent Argentinean author having a reputation of the father of post-modernism and who largely marked the worldwide literature over the last several decades of the past century. No wonder he greatly influenced both Slovenian and Croatian literary production as well. The extent to which Borges was a break-through author is nicely conveyed by his “disciple” Danilo Kiš who distinguishes between literature before Borges and literature after Borges. In his works Borges, as a father of modern intertextuality, gets playful with various philosophical, psychological and sociological theories and that is the foundation for his creation of a completely independent aesthetic entity, with a background hint of a comprehensive system of thinking. This is exactly what Virk’s book deals with – through a precise analysis of Borges’ prose, poetry and essays he is attempting to penetrate into this system of minds and ideas. There he particularly focuses on thematical systems of time, dreams, labyrinths and mirrors and he reaches the conclusion that these systems are closely intertwined with the idea of repetition. This idea is a general paradigm of Borges’ work which not only permeates fundamental thematical systems as their common core but also incorporates into a separate and therefore particularly influential Borges’ writing technique which is intertextuality – no more than a certain from of repetition. In the final synthesis Virk gives concrete examples with a comparison of Borges’s world of ideas with the analysis of ontology of pre-modern societies.

„The fear of Naiveté: the Poetry of the Postmodernist Prose“ is a monograph about Postmodernism, the last globally spread literary movement. The concepts of postmodernism and postmodern in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s penetrated into certain social sciences at the light speed – into philosophy, sociology, history of art, literary science and others – but because of their overly broad and contemporary use they soon faced their own inflation. Due to the inflation they are still used in enumerate meanings and in accordance with a famous postmodern motto anything goes. Virk’s book wants to define postmodernism in a different and more mandatory way, although the author is aware of the necessary plurality of how postmodernism is seen. Plurality however does not imply randomness; therefore Virk is attempting to outline his understanding of postmodernism as one of the possibilities of understanding postmodernism with as many arguments as possible and in accordance with the leading world theories. For that purpose Virk firstly outlines an overview of those theories, and then, based on accurate readings of separate postmodern texts and in a dialogue with other theories, he gives his view of postmodernism. The basic thesis of the book lies in the concept that postmodernism, from a spiritual-historic point of view, is the ultimate stage of metaphysical nihilism. At a formal level this standpoint is reflected in postmodern metafiction and inter-textuality that shake readers’ trust into the credibility of the world as rendered by the literature.

Excursions abroad gives a selection of interpretations, essays and comparative studies on several significant authors from the world literature. This book comprises a selection of prose writers its author, Prof.Virk, for various reasons finds particularly attached to and whom he intensively studied. The chosen authors come from three distinctive worlds in terms of literature and culture – thus the book is aptly, and a bit Hegelianly, divided into three parts, each bringing three authors. The first chapter features treatises from the Spanish language-based literature and the authors who are either historically (Cervantes) or culturally and geographically (Borges, Márquez) remote from contemporary Slovenian and Croatian readers. The second chapter is devoted to the authors comprising modernist Middle European environment, thus making them more familiar in terms of both culture and geography (Muschg, Kafka, Eco). The third chapter deals with the Russian literature (Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Akunin) we may consider rather close, but at the same time very distant as well. Each of the three parts – thematically as well as in terms of the author selections – depicts an archway from canonised classics to postmodernism.

The ten papers on the monograph entitled Na pomolu sodobnosti ali o književnosti in romanu (On the Quay of Contemporaneity; Literature and the Novel) investigate the role and meaning of contemporary literature. This investigation is in two parts: the first, On Literature, is theoretical in nature, giving a survey of writings on the history of literature. The second, Concerning the Novel, is dedicated to the analysis of a single Slovene novel in each  discussion. The two are not only linked by way of looking at the Slovene novel within the wider context and establishing the links between the two, but also through methodology, or, more precisely, methodological pluralism. The various methods, insights and approaches are balanced through the lens of post-classical narratology, stress being laid on context, the text and the reader / critic, the core rule of post-classical narratology being the shift between the text and the co-text. It passes from cognition through ethics to ideology; this is therefore not only an analysis of narration, but also its reading within a wider social and cultural context.

         The paper Literarnost, ponovno (Literariness) discusses the questions “What is literariness?” and “When is literariness?”Although sometimes there is a thin differentiating line that distinguishes a literary text from a non-literary one, it is precisely the knowledge of literariness that eliminates the challenge of differentiation, when the dominant or predominating features are taken into account in comparing various texts. In the study entitled Trivijalnost nakon postmodernizma (The formulaicity in literature after postmodernism) it was useful to add literary historical dimensions to socio-cultural analyses of mass literature, wherein belongs formula fiction, by connecting them with the properties of the post-modern, post-modernism and mass culture. Discussion Vrijeme uspješnica (The time of bestsellers) deals with the notion that the difference between literariness (the characteristic of a quality book) and formulaicity (the characteristic of a bestseller) is huge. A best-seller is a book which achieves an unusual market success by way of various factors: the actuality of the theme, fashion, market needs, propaganda, favourable offers made to the booksellers, multiplication by way of various media, praising of the book before it even proves itself on the market, prizes, celebrity endorsement, the size of the book market and lists of the factors of success as means of manipulation. Slovene literature in the post-modern age is not yet a complete phenomenon and so research Slovenska književnost nakon 1990 godine (Slovene literature since 1990) is faced with two challenges: to combine the literary perspective with the sociological, historical and culturological, and to achieve sufficient (academic) distance from current literary production.

The term transrealism is once again discussed in the study Transrealizam – novi pravac suvremenog slovenskog romana? (Transrealism – a new trend in the contemporary Slovene novel?). The very prefix in the term transrealism shows that it is closely connected with the previous realist trends and that in it repeatability and eclecticism take on a significance permeated by the new role of the literary subject.

In the paper Alamut I suggest several possibilities for introducing the novel in  historical, philosophical and religious, and psychological perspectives, by presenting the novel as a sketch for effective literary reading. Alamut can be read on various levels: while reading the double-layered text, the attention is directed first at the story and then at the broader narrative. In the study Pimlico, Pimlico by Milan Dekleva is compared to The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Both are modern European novels which can be successfully understood only through modern interpretation. In the paper Čitateljska skica za Jančarev roman Polarna svjetlost (A reading sketch for Jančar´s novel Severni sij) the picture of prewar Maribor conveys the contemporary message about the absurdity of violence, the limits of human reason and the limitless hatred. The article Antiutopijski otok u romanu Filio nije kod kuće Berte Bojetu (The distopian island in novel Filio is not at home Berte Bojetu) researches the novel as a modified traditional novel: takes it to be a modified type of traditional novel, looking as it does to the tradition while undergoing various transformations, the most present of which is its genre syncretism (a love story with a psychological bias, dystopian novel and parable,) the  role of the narrator and an increased amount of dialogue. This makes the narrative lively and dramatic, qualities that come most to the fore in the dialogue which conveys contemporaneity and the writer’s empathy. In the last paper, Pijetlov doručak, knjižna i filmska uspješnica (The Cockerel’s Breakfast, a best-seller and film blockbuster), a book by Feri Lainšček is compared to a film by Marko Naberšnik. The Cockerel´s Breakfast has been a hit both in book form and on the screen.

When books The Ethics of Reading by Joseph Hillis Miller, The Company We Keep by Wayne C.Booth and Love’s Knowledge by Martha C.Nussbaum were published in the USA around 1990 – books that were met by a wide reception, and which all touched the relationship between the literature and the ethics, each from its own point of view and method – they incited a plethora of other similar works and treatises, and soon “ethical reversal in the literary science” was announced within American academic circles. The phenomenon was most pronounced in the USA and UK, partly spread into German and French literary sciences, and with a little delay into Chinese and South Korean sciences, whereas it failed to immerse into other regions so prominently. Nevertheless, a central role of North American humanities has provided global importance and influence over the past decades thus reaching into Slovenia. Past few years hosted two scientific symposia featuring literature and ethics, and here is the first Slovene monography dealing with the phenomenon. Virk’s monography features and reviews some of the most important topics of the literature and ethics within the ethical reversal that had a widespread response. Most attention is paid to M.Nussbaum, W. Booth, A. MacIntyre, H. Meretoja, J. Phelan, W. Müller, A. Nünning, E. Levinas, J. Derrida, P. de Man, J. Hillisu Miller, G. C. Spivak and Nie Zhenzhao. Virk outlines each of their fundamental contributions to ethical literary science, and then reviews their theories and cautions about the traps ethical approaches in the literature in general are faced with. As he pointed out in the introduction, Virk is not attempting to establish his own pattern of ethical literary science (he implies this may happen in the future at best), but focuses on the critical analysis of ethical reversal. Yet, in the conclusion he gives several suggestions on how to eliminate principal flaws of ethical literary science. What points to the contemporary methodical literary-scientific issues, dealing with ethical questions, is that Virk’s monography dug the first shovel. It points to the current world issues, but simultaneously it is not purely panoramic but problematic, analytical and critical. It is not merely an introduction into ethical literary science – quite the contrary. Despite author’s restraints about the topic, the work is a significant contribution to the subject matter. Virk’s book, widely opening up to contemporary literary-scientific trends, is nevertheless mostly featured by traditional, classical humanities.
Dr. Tone Smolej

The theory of literature was featured by two types of interpretations in the 20 century. The first included widely comprehended ways of interpreting the essence of literature and attempts to bring some order into it, whereas the other followed the procedures of over-formalizing that never took real roots. If the former derived from the belief the theory broadened our knowledge about the construction of a literary work, the latter generally shunned from the theory because of the belief literature can be comprehended even without theoretical knowledge. The resistance to the theory was even connected with a belief that the theory created yet another language (discourse) with whose assistance we can interpret other languages – e.g. the language of the work and the language of the interpretation, i.e. literary critics, which significantly increases the content of the language and its layers thus causing the distancing from the most important thing – the literature itself. Although theory of literature has always stirred controversies, and despite its aporias and ambivalence, it thrived throughout the history and it was exactly the 20 century that gave most theoretical paths, schools and movements. Paradoxically the same era (mostly the end of the 20 century) also stirred most interest into the topics, with a plethora of related works being published after the traditional era ended, which created the need to reform the theory. The end of its traditional form was partly embedded in the very concept of post-modernism, the concept of thinning former categories of genre and discourse as present day writings are simply referred to as theory, depicting everything or nothing from the “traditional theory”.

Renowned Slovenian literary historian and comparative literature professor Matevž Kos in a monograph with the appealing title “Years of Dangerous Life”, addresses one of the most intriguing topics in the history of Slovenian literature: literary (especially novelistic) depictions of the Second World War. Right after the liberation, the Second World War became a significant topic of Slovene literature, and the attitude towards it remains a neuralgic point of Slovene culture and politics until today when we can still follow the consequences of prewar and interwar tragic schism that led to revolution, civil war, collaborations, postwar deaths, etc. In literary depictions of the war in the period between 1945 and 1990, the image that prevailed was painted and experienced by the victors; while alternative lighting and different evaluations, such as those that arose in exile (especially in Argentina), in socialist Yugoslavia were, of course, undesirable and carefully censored. For various reasons, in the decade after Slovenia gained its independence, despite gradual breaking of the taboo, the topic was not in the focus, but in the new millennium, there were many new attempts at literary thematics that have not yet participated in synthetic comparative discussion. Kos’s book does not consider the entire, barely concise corpus of texts about the war: it leaves aside most artistically less ambitious debates and tackles the problems in problem sections (“five fragments”) in which it effectively reaches the very core of the issue – and thus, seemingly paradoxically, it nevertheless provides synthetic insights. Thus his discussion meaningfully begins with Kocbek, one of the most interesting interpreters of war and revolution, and continues with Pirjevac, a former partisan political commissar and later influential philosopher, and Vitomil Zupan, a partisan and later a political prisoner; ends with a consideration of the famous novels of the last decade. Kos approaches the analysis without any ideological prejudices and leaves the literary works to speak from their unique, singular perspective.
Marijan Dović, prof.

The aim of Virk’s monograph Under Prešeren’s Head. Slovene Literature and Social Changes: National State, Democracy and Transitional Discrepancies is to analyse the structural changes in the Slovene literary system since its beginning, particularly the shift in the social role of the Slovene literature since the Slovene independence, gained in 1991. For this purpose, the study departs from broadly developed hypotheses about the nature of the relation between Slovene literature and Slovene society. In the period before the independence, this relation had often been treated and at least its basic features outlined. The Slovenes were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire up to the First World War. They didn’t have their own state and its institutions. As a consequence, the culture, and within it literature in particular, acquired a special, exalted significance. Slovene literature – such was at least its predominant (self) image – was one of the most important media of national self-awareness in the 19th century. With the establishment of the communist regime after the Second World War, Slovene literature gained a new, politically emancipatory dimension. Throughout the period of total ideologization, literary texts were one of the rare media for freedom and ideological uncontrollability. The literature gradually began to open up silenced, undesirable topics, and a large part of literary writing, but also a literary culture in whole, thus gained a political dimension: oppositional, dissident, or at least para-dissident. With the transition to a parliamentary democracy and with gaining independence, new social conditions arose, which also influenced the cultural and the literary sphere. The traditional social role of literature – i.e. national-constitutive and politically emancipatory – characteristic of Slovene literary culture, changed significantly, and literature itself slowly began to adapt to this: on the level of public influence and resonance it was a shift from social-national representativeness to gradual marginalization and at the same time, in particular among the young literary generations, also an adaptation to the new reality. The aim of the study is to research how the critical potential of Slovene literature was modified in this period.
prof. dr. Janez Vrečko

The scientific monograph The Collision of The Worlds: Studies on Contemporary Slovene Drama contains twelve studies joined into a whole by their common object of study, namely contemporary Slovenian drama, as well as by their common methodological framework, in which the approaches of literary history and literary theory are constantly connected with those of theatre studies, culture studies, sociology, history, anthropology, and other aspects. The first five studies give a perspective on the features that characterise the development of Slovene drama after 1991 (with the most attention paid to the newest plays after 2000), presenting the breakthrough for female playwrights, the social relevance of the selected dramatic texts, the influence of the media and media technologies on the writing and staging of plays, the features of comedy, and the role and significance of the Grum Award as the central prize for original Slovene plays. The analyses show that contemporary Slovene drama remains a vital part of Slovene literature, that it has mainly dealt with intimate topics since 1991, but that from 2006 on, there have been growing critical notes calling attention to various anomalies of contemporary society. There are also notable new textual practices, as well as a change in the role of the textual in theatres, which takes us into the field of the post-dramatic or the no-longer-dramatic, or rather, transcends both notions.

Prof. Dr. Tomo Virk, professor at the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the Faculty of Philosophy in Ljubljana, a top expert in both areas, added new value to his award-winning publications with the monograph Literature and Ethics. The text solves the essential problem of contemporary societies: how to avoid the relativization of good(ness) by insight into the inevitable cognitive and historical relativity of it. With his characteristic interweaving of theoretical-philosophical insight, literary and cultural-historical erudition, and lucid interpretation of fundamental sources, the author responds to the reflected vitality of literary discourse. He establishes that in the latter in a similarly non-trivial way as in life, the general, singular, (supra)historical, cognitive and emotional dimensions of ethical dilemmas are intertwined and mirrored. That is why literature can be ethical in codifying the fundamental rules of cohabitation and in the auto-reflexive opening of their enigmatic foundation. Everything points to the fact that in literary discourse we must reflectively experience the infinite openness of life’s ethos. Just like literature, Literature and Ethics does not offer an unequivocal solution to the aforementioned dilemmas, and at the same time, in the way they are considered, we sense the living secrecy of absolute openness, which in its last extract rejects the reasons for that which is not good. Thus, the monograph offers us an original answer to the super-historical dilemma about the connection between the good, the true and the beautiful: we do not find the good in the (hypothetical) knowledge of truth and beauty, but only the empathic experience of a non-trivial ethical judgment can be truthful and aesthetic.

Potential readers of Literature and Ethics are primarily (future) connoisseurs of these subject areas. With its erudite momentum and dialogic attitude, the monograph will expand the horizons of the interested public and experts in the field of philosophy, (cultural) history, sociology and related sciences. It will be of interest to everyone who wants to be a part of the vital power of humanities – preserving the meaning of life.

The cognitive power of Literature and Ethics springs from a superior theoretical thought which, in its latest refinement, has devised its own limitations. Namely, in the autoreflexive turn, it not only realizes that it cannot encompass the complexity and singularity of life situations in which we follow (un)ethical decisions, but also the fact that in this intertwining, it essentially approaches to (and at the same time builds on) the literary simulacrum of life. Thus, the programmatic departure from the “scholarly” discourse towards the dialogic one is not a sign of abandoning the cognitive potentials of theoretical speech, but quite the opposite –  in openness to literary openness, these potentials are enhanced. After the introductory explanation of the basic problem, Tomo Virk reveals a range of situations in which literature embodies the ethical non-triviality of human existence. The first three chapters consider the cultural-historical period of ancient ethics and literature from normativity to the field of reflection, and the following seven concentrate on ethical issues that summarize the autoreflexive nature of modern literary discourse (theodicy, conscience, empathy, otherness, political correctness). Selected examples (Voltaire, Goethe, Poe, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Bulgakov, Borges, Camus, Roth, Schlink, Morrison, Coetzee) establish a framework for literary-scientific and philosophical thinking about the most demanding epistemological and ethical problems. Despite the challenging nature, the argumentation always remains friendly to the reader’s horizon of understanding, especially by means of expert syntheses of a complicated intertextual network of literary and cultural-historical references. The text is imbued with the spirit of both ethics and literature – not only because it is thematically interwoven with the red thread of empathic openness, but also because it constantly manifests this openness with its focus on discussion. In the monograph Literature and Ethics, which is exceptional both in terminological and didactic terms, ethics becomes, so to speak, performative. (“…”).

prof. Dejan Kos

Literary imagology is a branch of comparative literature that deals with the image of the Foreign in domestic literature and vice versa. It began to develop already in the first half of the 20th century, and it experienced a theoretical flourishing in the seventies when Hugo Dyserinck and Daniel-Henri Pageaux began to engage with it. Although it was occasionally expelled from the profession, due to its distinct interdisciplinary nature, it always returned to comparative research. The monograph Cities, heroes, soldiers, based on Pageaux’s theory, brings discussions about philhellenism, about the image of Poland, Bosnia and German officers in Slovenian literature, and at the same time focuses on descriptions of some European cities (Vienna, Paris, Venice, Rome) done by Slovenian writers. 

Prof. Tone Smolej, PhD, is a tenured professor at the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. In the field of French-Slovenian literary contacts, he published three books (Slovenian reception of Emil Zola, 2007; From French Slovenianized, 2008, and Slovenian reception of French literature from classicism to symbolism, 2018). In two monographs, he researched the history of Slovenian writers, students of Austro-Hungarian universities (“What more to experience and become”. Slovenian writers, Viennese students, 2015; Slovenian literature and higher education, 2020). Together with Majda Stanovnik, he wrote the biography of Antun Ocvirk (2007) and is the co-author of the History of the Faculty of Philosophy in Ljubljana (2019). He also commented on several Slovenian editions of French classics.. 

Toma Virk’s scientific monograph »Under Prešerno’s head« focuses on the research of the “transitional intersections” of Slovenian literature in the period after 1990, against the background of the traditional social role that Slovenian literature had in the past, before national independence. The first part of the book is theoretical, with a precise reading of the writings of Dušan Pirjevac, partly also of Janko Kos, it claims that the history of literature in Slovenia defined the specifics of Slovenian literature in connection with its social role – until the First World War or even the Second World War, it served the purpose of consolidating national consciousness. The author confirms these theses and supplements them with some more recent insights. In the second part of the monograph, he deals with the social role of Slovenian literature from 1945 to 1990. Analyzing social-historical and cultural-political events, above all those in Slovenian literary culture, he claims that literature in that period still has a very significant, even irreplaceable social role and function, but not only as the basis of national consciousness, but above all as a substitute for the missing institutions of democratic political pluralism. The central question of the book is what happened to the social role of literature after 1990, when Slovenians replaced both traditional shortcomings, got their own state and parliamentary democracy. The author particularly analyzes trends in Slovenian poetry, prose and drama that occurred after the independence. For the last decade of the 20th century, he notes a relatively vague involvement of literature in social and political events, but after the year 2000 this changed. Virk observed the up-to-date response of literary texts to current political events, but without the constructive effect characteristic of the previous two considered periods. He sees one of the reasons for that in the social marginalization of literature, and the solution in pointing out the ethical potential of literature.