Marko Juvan (Znanstvenoraziskovalni center Slovenske akademije znanosti in umetnosti, Ljubljana)
In the wake of its late capitalist renaissance, the Goethean idea of world literature is interpreted either in terms of intercultural dialogism or hegemony embodied in the asymmetrical structure of the world literary system. Launching the concept of Weltliteratur during the emergence of the early industrial globalization, Goethe initiated a long-lasting transnational meta-discourse that autopoietically influenced the development of transnational literary practices. In his aristocratic, cosmopolitan humanism, Goethe expected world literature to open up an equal dialogue between civilizations and languages, encouraging cross-national networking of the educated elite. But his notion of dialogue is marked by the hegemony of Western aesthetic and humanistic discourse, based on the ancient canon of Europeanism. Marx and Engels exposed aesthetic and humanist cosmopolitanism as the ideology masking European bourgeoisie’s global economic hegemony and the world-wide expansion of Western geoculture.
It is within this ambivalence of dialogism and hegemony that the process of “worlding” (Kadir) and nationalizing European literatures has taken place since the early 19th century. To weaker and peripheral literatures such as the Slovenian, the idea of world literature tended to represent a law-giving Other. The lecture will outline the process of worlding and imagining literature in Slovenian language as national. The utopian envisioning and the institutional and medial emergence of a “Slovenised” literary system was intertwined with the unification, purification, and standardization of Slovenian literary language. With self-referential intertextual links to the topoi of Parnassus and Elysium (as epitomes of “classicalness”), Slovenian poetry of the Enlightenment marked the distinction between its ethno-lingual and cultural singularity and the norms derived from ancient classics. Beginning with Prešeren’s romantic universalism, self-reference and intertextuality became more intensely involved in comparing Slovenian verbal art with other modern European literatures, with the intention to be integrated into the emerging system of world literature.