Албена Хранова

The text deals with the disciplinary mapping and methods of the conceptual history field. It starts with the already classic opposition between Reinhart Koselleck's and Quentin Skinner's founding notions, and the emerging of many newer interpretations of the issue in the recent years. It pays special attention to 1) the relevance of conceptual history to the cultural history paradigms, and 2) its debatable relevance to comparative methods, which could ensure or not its instrumental power as it refers to different separate case studies, and especially Balkan ones.

In Albena Hranova’s “Statements on “Time Shelter” the thesis statements are rather questions to the flexible but vague ideography of Georgi Gospodinov's novel “Time Shelter”: the new status of personal history in the author's writing; the relationship between the material items and verbal stories; the transition from early-romantic to late-romantic characterology in Gaustin; the relationship between memory and the past in the modes of the individual and in the actions of societies; and the presence of “lyrical” arguments in the armature of this dystopia.