Review: Intelektualac, kultura, reforma: Ivan Mažuranić i njegovo vrijeme. Zbornik radova, ur. Dalibor Čepulo, Tea Rogić Musa i Drago Roksandić, Zagreb: Pravni fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu; ...Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža, 2014 – 2019, 344 stranice. Review by Vlasta Švoger.
Since 2013, several local programmes have been conducted in Croatia with the aim of promoting and stimulating reading to children at an early age; however, no such project or campaign had previously ...existed at the national level. Prompted by this information, the Children and Youth Services Commission of the Croatian Librarian Association contacted potential partners with the suggestion of using the occasion of the European Year of Reading Aloud (2013) to launch the first Croatian national campaign aimed at promoting reading aloud to children from birth. The campaign would gradually expand to include librarians, paediatricians, maternity wards and associations dedicated to the rights of children from the earliest age. This paper provides an overview of all global programmes and projects aimed at promoting reading aloud to children from birth and empowering parents. National libraries play an important role in such programmes and projects. The paper also briefly presents reading programmes in Croatia conducted at the local level. Special attention is given to the Croatian national campaign promoting reading aloud to children from the earliest age, Read to me!, launched in 2013. The paper presents the results of the campaign in its three years of existence.
Since childhood, Tony Fabijančić has travelled frequently to Yugoslavia and Croatia, the homeland of his father. He spent time with his peasant family in the village of Srebrnjak in the north and ...escaped to the Adriatic islands in the south where he could break free from the constraints of everyday life. Those two worlds—the north, marked by the haunting saga of family life, its history and material practices, and the south, a place defined by travel and escape—formed the two halves of Fabijančić’s Croatian life. Over time, he observed Srebrnjak become a white-collar weekend retreat, the community of peasants of the 1970s, to which he was first introduced, only a distant memory. From the continental interior of green valleys and plum orchards to the austere and skeletal karst coast, Drink in the Summer is a unique record of a place and people now lost to time, a description of a country’s varied landscapes, and a journey of discovery, freedom, beauty, and love.
The article analyses the traces of video art aesthetics in the poetry of Branko Čegec, one of the “Croatian poets of the language experience,” as Zvonimir Mrkonjić termed that generation of poets, ...and of metalanguage poetry, as Goran Rem collectively called Čegec and the poets thematizing the aforementioned language experience. The aim is to address the elements of literary contact with the language of video art, that is, to approach the poetry recognizable as video art (of Nam June Paika and Laurie Andersson) due to its concrete, linguistic, material. The very term “language experience poetry” denotes that its main feature is the linguistic coding or meta-linguistics, thus the article also deals with the awareness of traces from other arts, primarily video art. The article is based on the definitions of intermediality, media, postmodernism, and video art. The analysis of selected works of art in this article emphasises the video elements of visual and auditory imagery, as well as provides new interpretations of Čegec’s poetry.
The question from the title may at first seem somewhat unusual or even exaggerated, but we can rightfully ask it to the Croatian public, and sometimes each of us can ask ourselves the same question. ...And that in the sense of the preferred version of the Croatian language in public use, which is the literary language (standard). We will all find ourselves many times in a situation where we need to speak or write in the literary Croatian language, regardless of our level of education or profession, primarily because this is the only language in which all of us in Croatia can fully communicate.
