Home Literary Studies Fingierter Mythos, gefälschter Kommentar: Techniken der Simulation in Prosper Mérimées „La Guzla“
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Fingierter Mythos, gefälschter Kommentar: Techniken der Simulation in Prosper Mérimées „La Guzla“

  • Gun-Britt Kohler
Published/Copyright: September 25, 2009
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Abstract

Present article examines Prosper Merimée’s ‘La Guzla’, a collection of ballads published in 1827, in the context of myth and fabrication of literary constructions of People and Nation in the 18th and 19th century. It elicits this work’s strategies of fiction, which – systematically disposed and subtly arranged on different layers of the text – disclose Merimée’s mystification of Croatian and Serbian folktales as a ‘fake’, as a feigned myth. From this perspective the ‘mistakes’, by means of which in the course of time literary criti­cism thought to unmask the mystification as deficient, turn out to be not ‘shortcomings’ but rather a well calculated technique: they reveal the strategies of creating a ‘fictive myth’ by means of which Merimée criti­cises the poetics of production and reception of his time.

Published Online: 2009-09-25
Published in Print: 2009-06

© by Akademie Verlag, Berlin, Germany

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