Книжка-2

Table of Contents: Issue 2, 2022 - Bulgarian, English

This thematic block of articles was written at the Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies (Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) and the Institute for Literature (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) as part of the joint research project “Image and Text as a Means of Cross-Cultural Transfer” (2020–2022). Financial support from ZRC SAZU and BAS is gratefully acknowledged. The thematic block of articles is edited by Alenka Koron and Kalina Zahova.

The text is dedicated to the use of poetical figures and of images in the working with concepts, namely within the field of philosophy and literary theory. The large excursus starts from an attempt of the American theoretician Mitchell to define images by only restricting his effort to historicizing the definition – with no definition of himself. A follow-up is the conception of Jacques Derrida of all metaphysical concepts being hidden metaphors whose meaning was depleted of figuration. In this context is viewed the work of Hegel on symbolic thought and memory. Image is revealed as an instrument of memory. And finally, there is a hypothesis of the material in signification borrowed to a certain extent from the deconstructionist Paul de Man

This article examines an early stage of collaboration between image and text – in the creative process in literature and humanities. Based on the work of several writers and one philosopher, four types of relation are distinguished, which show the different role of the image toward the text in the writing process: from a preparation tool, through an aid, to an essential function in the creation of the text.

After a brief presentation of imagology as a field of contemporary comparative literature, the paper critically analyses the image of Bulgarians in the poem cycle Rapsodije bolgarskega goslarja (1902) by Slovenian poet Anton Aškerc (1856–1912). This cycle of thirteen poems deals with the liberation struggle of the Bulgarians from the Turks. The Bulgarian translations of the poems received a relatively extensive reception, which was not true of the original version in Slovenia. The present paper attempts to demonstrate the origin and function of the image of Bulgarians as representatives of a foreign nation or as the Other in the intercultural transfer of Aškerc’s cycle. From an imagological perspective, it sheds light on the social and cultural processes in which the poet’s image of the Foreign was formed.Keywords: image, drawing, text, manuscript, creative process

This article proposes a new reading of an inscription on a pitcher discovered in 1955 in Pliska by Stamen Mihaylov. The inscription is read as a mixed Cyrillic and runic text. One of the runes used in the inscription is present in the runic script from the Yenisey Basin in Siberia and thus connects the Proto-Bulgarians that inhabited Danube Bulgaria with this Asian region.

Since the Age of Enlightenment, mountains have gradually changed from a predominantly geological category to an aesthetic one. The new, essentially spiritualized and aestheticized experience of the mountain landscape has found increasing appeal in both the visual arts (especially painting) and literature (especially poetry). Moreover, in the course of the long nineteenth century, mountains often became an object of nationalist appropriation. Such a development was also characteristic of Slovenian culture. This article deals with early Slovenian poetry and its relationship to mountains. It shows that Baron Sigmund Zois and the poet Valentin Vodnik already recognized the national and poetic potential of Mount Triglav with Lake Bohinj and Savica Falls. Their ideas found an echo in the Slovenian poetry of the period before 1848, but it was the great Romantic poet France Prešeren that added a historical-mythological layer to them in his Baptism on the Savica (1836). A brief overview demonstrates that Slovenian poetry from Valentin Vodnik to Simon Gregorčič manifestly contributed to making the mountains a sacred and mythical national place.

The relationship between developments in a “real” society and the portrayal of this society in literature can be studied by analyzing the linguistic picture of the world using the componential analysis method. The concept of the linguistic picture of the world has been developed by various interdisciplinary directions in Europe and the US, relying on the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who conceived of language as a specific manifestation of culture. The linguistic picture of the world is an interpretation, conceptualization, and presentation of the world conveyed through language. A componential analysis was conducted to compare the semantic components of the concept of early-nineteenth-century society and the components of the same concept in a literary work of the Slovenian Biedermeier (i.e., the first original Slovenian narrative). The results of this analysis showed differences in the concept’s content that can be identified as criticism of the real society and an alternative reading option.

he article studies the artist's books of some of the most famous writers and painters of our time George Badin and Michel Butor.

It has often been said that after 1900 formal modernism diminished the role of the mimetic (i.e., imitation or representation) in all arts. This article opposes such a general conclusion. Formal modernism in art did not represent any general relationship to the mimetic; rather, it questioned the traditional relationship to forms of representation within each particular art form. Although a traditional notion of mimesis indeed makes it possible to see a good deal of literature and the visual arts as less mimetic after 1900, twentieth-century music discovered unprecedented representational possibilities, which are illustrated with the case of musique concrète. In the last section, the article reflects on its thesis with a comparative perspective on the postmodernist turn in various arts.

Popular song lyrics are a very important object of study, although they are sometimes not appreciated properly. The last third of the twentieth century saw popular song receding from its lyrics by the image, namely the video – the image-based legislator of popular music for a few decades. However, the lyrics have found their way to strike back, and this article outlines some manifestations of their importance in contemporary culture(s). With the rise of lyric videos, popular music made a turn toward the interpretative challenges of written poetry because watching such videos involves a process of reading while listening. Further literaturization of popular music comes from the transformation of song lyrics into books – under certain conditions, reading the lyrics as written poems includes hearing them internally as songs.

This article typologizes visual poetry of the Slovenian neo-avant-garde. The Slovenian neo-avant-garde, which flourished roughly from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, was closely connected to student movements on the one hand, and to new theoretical and philosophical currents on the other. Young authors thus tested the boundaries of literary discourse and experimented with new artistic practices, such as happenings, performance, multimedia projects, land art, and so on. In so doing, they drew heavily upon the artistic and literary practices of the historical avant-garde, which again gained popularity at that time as well. Although the intertwining of the verbal and the visual in literature in the 1960s was not new, it reached new dimensions with the development of conceptualism.

The twenty-first century gave birth to a new generation of “internet natives” that are actively developing a new form of communication – the laconic semi-visual and semi-verbal tidbits of wit and wisdom known as memes. The study of memes is only just beginning to emerge, mainly in the West, and the ubiquitousness of the phenomenon requires researchers to actively classify the linguistics of meme culture according to its integral semiotic properties and its unique historicity. Memes have become the new form of sharing and togetherness, and to ignore the significance of this phenomenon is to miss the core dynamics of the new generation of communicators.