Volume 52, Issue 1 - Special Issue: National Poets and Romantic (Be)Longing / Issue Editor: Marijan Dović

Jameson’s concept of modern third-world literature as national allegory is also pertinent for the 19 th -century peripheries of the first-world literature. Aware of their dependence on imperial powers, the protagonists of (semi)peripheral national movements longed for the recognition of their nascent collective identity by the lawgiving Other – the symbolic order of ‘universal’ tradition. The figures of “national poets” (Nemoianu) were invented to represent their respective nations to the gaze of the Other, symbolized by the emerging world literature and empowered through the inter-state system dominated by the core countries. In a secular parallel to the canonization of saints in the Catholic Church, “worlding” (Kadir) a national poet was crucial in the (unfulfilled) longing for his/her universal acknowledgment as belonging to the hyper-canon. While several national poets involved in national movements showed a “vernacular” tendency (Terian), Schiller and Goethe represented the more “cosmopolitan” model of a national classic. Such ‘affiliation’ to the universal aesthetic canon is also characteristic of the politics of Slovenian romantic movement and its poet, France Prešeren. Although Prešeren’s poetry, which was exposed to Austrian censorship, only sparsely employs an explicit political discourse, his imaginary worlding and intertextual transfer of universal aesthetic repertoires from the established literatures into a Habsburg periphery fashioned a cosmopolitan strategy of cultural nationalism. Prešeren has been venerated in Slovenia since the late 19 th -century as the singular national classic whose oeuvre compensates for the apparent lack of classical and modern traditions in Slovenian and deserves to be recognized worldwide.

The first part of this paper deals with how Sándor Petőfi (aka Alexander Petrovits) was elevated to the status of Hungarian national poet from an ethnically non-Magyar and otherwise controversial background (a dubious birthplace and mother tongue, a mysterious death). In a dynamic of longing and belonging, Petőfi himself was keen to shape and reshape the various layers of his ethno-cultural, regional and political identities, drawing on mythical and modern elements in equal measure, and, through his inclination for role playing, sometimes even ironizing the gestures of identity fashioning. The second part surveys the political appropriations and both material and symbolic rituals of cult formation regarding his life and works. In conclusion, I analyze the rhetorical rite of admitting an ‘alien’ into the national community that was performed in Petőfi’s critical afterlife, with a brief excursion into the similar or counter-gestures it provoked in Slovak nationalism.

Bulgarian literature of the 19 th century, although widely unknown abroad, is decisive for the formation of Bulgarian national identity. In this respect, the authority of the ‘national poet’ Hristo Botev has been uncontested for 140 years. Botev has created the Bulgarian mytho-poetic narrative and imposed it as a set of political, social and ethical principles, crystalized to a corrective. Yet, Botev’s poetic agenda is contradictory. His nationalism, based on natural belonging to the people, kin and family, is persistently extended towards social criticism and a utopian longing for class equality. Thus, the prior national unity appears subverted: the representatives of the elite are stigmatized as non-belonging to the nation per se, to ‘the people,’ a collective subject, enslaved, suffering, passive, and mute. Such an irresolvable contradiction between the two struggles – for national liberation and for social emancipation – is additionally complicated by Botev’s third, most intimate longing – for personal unbinding that would take the radical form of self-emerging beyond any kinship and class affiliation. Thus, the mytho-poetic figure of an apocalyptic Motherland had to be re-articulated as the eternal ‘There’ of a coveted death. Finally, Botev’s self-victimization, orchestrated as a rebel raid, is his response to the fallen heroes and their failed sacrifice. Bulgaria’s most powerful national poet gave birth to a national myth of the genius who voluntarily gave up poetry and joined the masses by embracing their role of a victim.

Between Erich Auerbach and Walter Benjamin, there existed a remarkable friendship, which on the one hand manifested itself as an unobtrusive disputation, and yet which on the other hand could be considered an unintended collaboration toward an old-new ideal of philology. Auerbach claims that with the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Western European literature reached the climax of the figuralism that Auerbach, if belatedly, wants to bring to the fore. Benjamin, in contrast, finds energy for the revolution in the surrealistic love that traces back not to Dante, but to the Provençal poetry which Auerbach regards merely as preliminary to Danteʼs literary achievement. In his The Origin of German Tragic Drama , Benjamin highlights the concept of creatureliness, whose significance for his philosophy of history is no less than that of justice. Auerbach, for his part, does not find its expression in the Germany of the 17 th century, but in the France of the 16 th century, namely in the work of Michel de Montaigne. However, Montaigneʼs creatureliness is rooted in sermo humilis , which is best embodied in the story of Peter who denied his Lord Jesus Christ three times. By contrast, German creatureliness detects its dissolution in the idea of natural theatre that Benjamin locates in the work of Franz Kafka. Sermo humilis is the perfection of figuralism, whereas the idea of natural theatre means reversal of allegory. The perfected figuralism and the reversed allegory cooperate in the idea of the philology of instead ( Philologie des Stattdessen ), whose task it is to make bygone the futility of worldly things.

The “discovery” of the landscape and the growing interest in ruins in early modern times have been the objects of intense research over the last decades. The interaction between these two developments, by contrast, has only rarely been studied, and if so, mainly with regard to the visual arts. Within the literary tradition, only the travel literature of the 18 th and 19 th centuries has received any attention. How the relationship of landscape and ruins was conceived in the learned, mostly Latin literature of earlier centuries has never been examined in any detail. The present article tries to make good on this deficit. In the first section, it is shown how, from the Renaissance onwards, ruins came to be seen as an integral part of certain landscapes. This development was complemented by a perception of landscapes as ruins from the 17 th century onwards, the theme of section two. By way of conclusion, the convergence of landscape appreciation and ruinophilia in early modern times is explained with recourse to the emergence of a new historical consciousness: the new interest in landscape, ruins, and their interplay was kindled by a growing awareness of the fact that these environmental features carried precious information about, and could even be seen as an embodiment of, the history of mankind and the earth.

The article re-reads Werther’s legendary love with Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. It discovers a constitutive dimension of address and (postal) transfer that not only shapes Werther’s love, but also connects it to the often neglected form of the epistolary novel. Werther’s love is not tragic, and it is not all about Lotte – it is postal. Writing and loving share the constitutive dimension of addressing ‘the other’: distance does not indicate love’s failure; it turns out to be its productive principle. Werther’s love is thus not a ‘warning example,’ not the moral message of a tale – it exhibits and affirms the way modern love works. Anticipating psychoanalytic insight, love does not take place between two specific human beings, but circulates in a complex system of shifting addressees. The readers become involved in this postal system: the epistolary novel also addresses this love to us. Will we really ‘not be able to withhold [our] admiration and love’ as the editor tells us at the very beginning of Werther’s story? However – we seem to be the perfect match – as philo-logists...

No systematic investigations of Elfriede Jelinek’s authorial positioning within the hierarchies of the literary field exist. Previous research has nevertheless noted that the authorship is distinguished by a high degree of reflexivity in relation to the power structures it confronts. Studies on the very earliest phase of establishing herself in the Austrian literary field in the years 1966–1969 have, however, emphasized two characteristics: social isolation and literary imitation. Both aspects suggest authorial immaturity if not inferiority, which seems oddly anachronistic and normative given the astonishingly rapid literary success of Jelinek in this period. This article relates the early success to a shift of values in the literary field at the end of the 1960 s, which allowed for new forms of provocative and experimental expressions to generate literary capital. Jelinek’s transgressive authorial dispositions accumulate symbolic capital using a combination of eclectic texts and strategies of self-fashioning within quite diverse contexts, drawing on social networks, media outlets, and literary publications. The theoretical framework primarily draws on concepts developed by Pierre Bourdieu, most notably habitus and symbolic capital.

Since 2003, the city of Antwerp has a poet laureate. Following the classical and Renaissance models, the Antwerp poet laureate writes, performs, and materializes poems for the city. Also in the Hebrew Bible, texts occur that qualify as city poems avant-la-lettre , even though the writers remain anonymous and the texts are part of a larger corpus with a different purpose. This article reads three Antwerp city poems alongside with biblical Psalm 137, in search for the poems’ constructions of cities as homes. The selected texts each introduce the city (i. e., Antwerp for the Antwerp city poems; Jerusalem and Babylon for the psalm) and its possible identification with a home place in ways that are conceptually and stylistically similar. The poems only differ in their final portrayals of the home, themselves connected to the different context of each poem. Throughout the texts the poets explore and question the spatial categories of ‘city’ and ‘home.’ The analysis reveals that being at home both in biblical and Antwerp city poems is connected to childhood, which allows redefining the urban space. The poems conceive cities as a mobile category that is internalized if being defined as home space. Stylistic interventions, in particular the use of inclusios and contrast, help creating and establishing the city-as-home-space in the selected city poems. The juxtaposition of old and new city poems sharing the same topic offers new insights into the textual construal of cities as homes, a process that proves to be similar for the three Antwerp city poems and the biblical psalm.

Many of Hassan Blasim’s short stories fall into a broad category of unnatural narrative. In line with the most recent scholarship on unnatural narratology, this article first discusses the unnatural worldmaking strategies adopted by Blasim that include dead narrators, conflicting events, and ontological metalepsis. Second, it analyzes a set of unnatural acts closely related to the characters’ death and their consequential corporeal impairments. Third, it examines the mentality of Blasim’s characters by focusing on a particular type of unnatural mind – the paranoid mind, which in radical cases involves two conflicting minds simultaneously emerging in one character. By resorting to unnatural narratives, Blasim makes his short stories anti-mimetically impossible but nightmarishly real, which not only generates effects of defamiliarity and horror but also forces us to ponder over what is now happening in the seemingly remote parts of the world and to raise our common concerns for human suffering.