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.
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.
This article examines fiction, and in particular serialized translations, in the Slovenian-American newspaper Prosveta (Enlightenment) during its first decade (1916–1926) and compares it with three ...Czech-American newspapers in this regard. The comparisons establish-on the background of literary history and journalistic practices-the importance of fiction in immigrant newspapers at that time. The purposes of publishing translations in Prosveta are also considered as they relate to ethnic community building and an extension of nation-building in the United States. The newspaper is viewed as a community-building institution that featured significant reader contributions.
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