Volume 47, Issue 2

The concept of grace is as complex as it is wide-ranging: it is relevant to social history and the history of religion, to mythology, theology, law, ethics, social aesthetics, art theory, and the theory of culture. The Three Graces embody a structure of giving, receiving, and returning, i.e., actions that form part of the discourse on exchanging goods and gifts, – one that is normally quite distinct from the discourse on aesthetics and art theory. The question arises: how can aspects of the grace-discourse be reformulated by means of the gift-discourse? How can we form a conceptual configuration of gift, social interaction, and art? From a wide array of possible examples, some are singled out here for closer inspection: Castiglione’s sixteenth-century model of courtly society, the connection between the social aesthetic use of the concepts of grazia and sprezzatura , and their role in art theory, as well as the enhanced meaning of these concepts in the combined discourses on love, art, and (theological) grace that are to be found in the friendship between Michelangelo and the poet Vittoria Colonna; examples from the eighteenth to the twentieth century include Schiller’s considerations on grace and Charis, giving and being gifted, as well as Nietzsche’s new morality associated with lightness and self-giving. The essay is framed by Pliny the Elder’s anecdote about the competition between Apelles, the master of charis , and his fellow painter Protogenes, and by Pasternak’s modern version of it: a short story about two rival writers and their antagonistic exchange of gifts.

The study of the role of the Slovene national Poet France Prešeren (1800–1849) as mediator of intellectual-aesthetic concepts and literary models of German romantic and their reception in the Slovene literature from 1830 is based on the analysis of literary texts, that were published in chosen German speaking cultural periodics in Laibach (Ljubljana) – the centre of Slovene ethnic territory in the Austrian monarchy. The analysis includes also cultural (nonfictional) texts, which were participating in processes of cultural coding. The research focuses on the adaptation of A.W. Schlegel’s literary epigrammatic model by Prešeren as poet and as an influential actor in the Laibach Slovene and German cultural and literary field in the frame of his fundamental contribution to the constitution of the Slovene poetry and its idiom.

Is self-reflexivity, as is often maintained, a structural characteristic of literary modernity? To what extent does self-reflexivity provide a specifically modern as well as qualitative criterion which helps to distinguish between aesthetically experimental texts and less advanced ones? Proceeding from a problematization of the concept of modernity, I explore these questions with reference to E.T.H. Hofmann‘s Prinzessin Brambilla. Labelled a ‚Capriccio,‘ the narrative unfolds as an arabesque, in which subjectivity and textuality constitute each other, so that personal as well as semantic identity appear to be multiple. Just as the mythic ‚mirror brightness‘ of the well Udar releases from the constraint of being identical with oneself by transfiguring the „I“ into a reflexive medium of alterity which is sensually perceivable, so the narrative dynamics of the text lead one to produce a reading of it as a figuration of transgression. The thematic analysis leads to a transgression of self-reflexivity, which – on the level of form – is made comprehensible as a narratological transgression. The pluralisation of the I, which is narratively staged through the mirroring of the main character in others, corresponds also with the theatrical self-image of the actor. All in all it is evident that Hoffmann’s narrating en abîme organizes a dimension of the aesthetics of the text as well as of its reception, in which the literary dissolution of the Self gives way to reflexions of reading devoid of a subject. The innovative aspect of this study is the insight it provides into the dynamics of transgression inherent to the binarity of self-reflexivity. Only a poetologically transgressive self-reflexivity qualifies it to be a distinguishing criterion of literary modernity. In taking the aesthetic structures of subjectivity to the threshhold of their deconstitution, this poetically configured subliminality conveys a specifically modern sense of crisis.

One of the most important features of Czeslaw Milosz’s (1911–2004) literary output is his dialogue with religious thinkers. The Swedish eighteenth-century theologian and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg is among his important “interlocutors”. The present paper aims at discussing the key motifs in Milosz’s reflections on Swedenborg’s theology as well as defining the specific character of his interpretation of the thought of the author of Arcana Coelestia. In Swedenborg’s work, Milosz looked primarily for a remedy for the disease of modernity, whose most severe symptom is the disintegration of the world, which became subjected to the rule of William Blake’s Urizen. For Milosz the modern man is homeless within the inhuman space of an infinite universe which cannot be grasped by imagination. Swedenborg, on the other hand, restores the vertical points of reference, Heaven and Hell, and at the same time places them within the human soul. The restitution of spatial points of reference is of immense significance to Milosz, who emphasizes that Swedenborg’s system was aimed at liberating imagination, fettered by the scientific world-view. While reading Swedenborg, Milosz remarked also that the cause of Christianity’s weakness lay in its loss of original integrity and unity, and in its theology of marital love characterized by fear and escapism. The source of Milosz’s fascination with Emanuel Swedenborg’s thought has to do, among other things, with the positive and integrating force of Swedenborg’s thought, the idea of uniting man with God, matter with spirit, faith with reason, and language with being.

How can narrative come to terms with the past in a world hit by trauma was one of the questions most consistently investigated in the work of Walter Benjamin. Pursuing it in various past and present contexts, he gradually reassessed the marginalized literary tradition of narrative strolling along the scene of the crime, rummaging through and collecting of the putative indices. The chaotic execution site, calling its observers and investigators to responsibility toward its heap of ruins, resists sovereign narrative reconstruction of its emergence. The latter is therefore replaced by various conjectures, repeated preparations and hesitating roundabouts which ultimately turn the plot into a kind of a bewildering rebus, neither a story nor a picture. I read Dubravka Ugrešić’s posttraumatic novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1997) within this tradition of narratives that strategically couple the incompatible registers of discursive and visual presentation, trivial and high literature, the beautiful and the sublime, materiality and immateriality with one another. Its discourse is haunted by a multitude of exiled or absolved voices and gazes who do not permit a homogeneous and transparent story. Ugrešić’s narrator is, like Benjamin’s flaneur, obsessed by their summoning resonance stored in the myriad of dissipated fragments of today’s posttraumatic world.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings have often been read as ‘prophetic’, i.e. as authoritative cultural criticism that establishes new ‘values’ and points toward a new culture. Nietzsche himself draws heavily on biblical language and imagery, including the figure of the prophet. The essay addresses this relation in two ways: it analyzes how, especially the early reception, considers Nietzsche’s writings as ‘prophetic’ and how Nietzsche himself reads the prophets as protagonists of the re-evaluation of values. Moreover, a closer ‘Nietzschean’ reading of biblical prophecy shows that both Nietzsche and the prophets claim to pronounce a truth that transcends common understanding and that both refer to a language of radical destruction which eventually leads to the destruction of the very prophetic message itself. Thus, the figure of Nietzsche as a prophet can be read as an emblem of the fundamental epistemological crisis at the end of the nineteenth century, which changed the modes of theoretical discourse.

In 1857 Édouard Thierry and Barbey d’Aurevilly enter into the defence of the Fleurs du Mal, arguing that these strange poems are related to Dante’s Divina Commedia, the medieval model serving as a foil to the modern texts. Baudelaire intended to include those two vindicating articles in the third and final edition of his poetry, which seems to indicate that the French poet considered Dante’s work relevant to the understanding of the Fleurs du Mal. When Baudelaire the art critic deals with Doré’s and Delacroix’s visual interpretations of Dante, he underlines the great sadness of the Commedia in words that touch on his spleen, the theme which predominates in the „Limbes“ series of 1850–1851. Baudelaire does not say which passages of the Commedia his poems are referring to, but luckily T.S. Eliot, who admired both Dante and Baudelaire, can help. Eliot mentions lines of the third canto of the Inferno that fuse easily with the „Limbes“ poems. Eliot and other thinkers were fond of the canto which describes the vestibule of Hell. Up to now, critics have mainly searched for similarities with Baudelaire’s poems in the fourth canto of the Inferno, in Limbo, and have never found much. This article attempts to demonstrate that it is ideas from the third canto of the Inferno that can be conceived as a second voice to the „Limbes“, making the reading of Baudelaire’s early poems a more enriching experience.

The employee as a typical figure of modernity has been represented as a specific type of literary anti-hero since the nineteenth century. Italo Svevo’s early novel, Una vita (1982, A Life), is an example that is strongly related to the theme of the anti-hero in the French novel of disillusion, as well as to the fin-de-siécle concern with an incapacitated, dilettante protagonist, unable to act and live. In light of Svevo’s own misgivings about the profession of writing fiction, the novel reflects on the relation between literature and life, by way of an uprooted individual who finds himself ill at ease in the anonymous, competitive world of modernity. The subject of Svevo’s novel, the arrival of a provincial, petit-bourgeois intellectual to a semi-provincial city, may also be found in a somewhat later Brazilian novel, O amanuense Belmiro (The amanuensis Belmiro, 1937) by Cyro dos Anjos. Aside from parallels of plot, social, and geographical setting, which are grounded in the experience of modernity in different contexts, the two novels may be said to model a new kind of author-function, as well as a specific form of a non-linear, self-reflexive novel.

The article discusses the neo-romantic vision of Iceland in Judith Hermann’s travel story „Kaltblau“ (2003) and the essayistic portrait of postcolonial Greenland in Anna Kim’s travelogue „Invasionen des Privaten“ (2011). It compares the postmodern version of the Icelandic sublime with the sublime experience of Greenland’s ice sheet and juxtaposes the therapeutic aspects of contemporary nature tourism in Hermann’s story with the critical focus on questions of cultural identity in Kim’s essay.