Visual Cultures - Softcover

Elkins, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 184150307X ISBN 13: 9781841503073

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Visual Cultures is the first study of the place of visuality and literacy in specific nations around the world, and includes authoritative, insightful essays on the value accorded to the visual and the verbal in Japan, Poland, China, Russia, Ireland and Slovenia. The content is not only analytic, but also historical, tracing changes in the significance of visual and verbal literacy in each nation. Visual Cultures also raises and explores issues of national identity, and provides a wealth of information for future research. Visual Cultures will appeal to those with an interest in visual studies, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, area studies, subaltern studies, political theory, art history and art criticism.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

James Elkins is the E. C. Chadbourne Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

James Elkins is the E. C. Chadbourne Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Visual Cultures

By James Elkins

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2010 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-307-3

Contents

Introduction, 
Slovenia: Visuality and Literarity In Slovene Culture Andrej Smrekar, 
Japan: Lost In Translation, or Nothing To See but Everything Sunil Manghani, 
Ireland: Words Upon the Windowpane: Image, Text, and Irish Culture Luke Gibbons, 
Poland: A Visually-Oriented Literary Culture? Kris Van Heuckelom, 
China: Verbal Above Visual: A Chinese Perspective Ding Ning, 
Russia: To Read, To Look: Teaching Visual Studies In Moscow Viktoria Musvik, 
Critical Response Esther Sánchez-Pardo, 
Contributors, 

CHAPTER 1

Visuality and Literarity in Slovene Culture

Andrej Smrekar

I cannot assess from this standpoint whether the relationship between literarity and visuality in Slovene cultural history carries any outstanding peculiarities. If you ask a Slovene what constituted his identity, the answer would be unequivocal: language, writing, the book, Protestantism, and France Prešeren (1800–1849), whose verses were adopted for our modern anthem a century and a half later. At the accession to the European Union in May 2004, the National and University Library showed four of our earliest manuscripts — fragments of Slovene language between the tenth and fifteenth centuries — under the title "The Birth Certificate of Slovene Culture" (National and University Library 2004). They were the objects of a national pilgrimage. Slovene cultural history has been burdened by the heritage of Romantic nationalism, effectuated and distributed through literature. Literature has always been considered the nation-building art par excellence, whereas visual art has only been accorded such status since 1900. The literary historian Janko Kos put it succinctly as late as 1996: "As in all former periods (before World War II), the main art through which Slovene spiritual history could spell out the truth about itself was literature, above all poetry (Kos 1996)." At this point it was only a question of higher priority, because he held the visual arts of the twentieth century in high esteem — second only to poetry.

Literature and the visual arts have not been treated as competitors in Slovenian history, yet for a long time it was taken for granted that literature was the only art the Slovenes had. The Modernist exaltation of the visual was inaugurated at the end of the nineteenth century by the question of whether Slovene art existed at all. A response was expected from the Slovene Art Association, which had been founded, as it were, for this purpose. Furthermore, the discovery of Slovene art in 1904 by the Viennese critics was perceived as an important step toward Slovenian self-realization as a nation. The visual arts joined literature to become the liberal arts in truest sense (Brejc 1982). The artist Rihard Jakopic (1869–1943) initially believed that Slovene painting did not exist prior to his generation, although he himself contributed a reconstruction of the artistic tradition in the Slovene territories stretching back to the beginning of the century (Rihard Jakopic, 1910). As Francè Stelè (1886–1972) noted in the introduction to his Outline of History of Art in Slovene Territories in 1924, Jakopic insisted that Slovene art before 1800 did not exist (Stelè 1924). Slovene art history proved him wrong by revealing a rich artistic heritage in the Slovene territories from the late twentieth century onward.

The reasons for that belated recognition of the visual were manifold and complex. The central issue in Slovene culture of the nineteenth century was the question of identity. As with most nations — and particularly with small ones — it was based on the language that was the province of men of letters and native linguists. We can identify the adjective Slovene in the Protestant literature, but it is impossible to distinguish it from the meaning "Slavic". The brief Napoleonic occupation (1809–1813) and the creation of the Illyrian provinces, which cut Austria off from the sea, proved that political options other than the Austrian Empire were possible for a nation located within the smashed Crown of the Holy Roman Empire. The poet Valentin Vodnik (1758–1819) greeted the French as liberators from an enslavement by Germans. In such ways, Slovenes grew aware of their Slavic identity.

Jernej Kopitar published a grammar book of Slavic language in Carniolia, Carinthia, and in southern Styria in 1809 (Kopitar 1809). However, he perceived Slavs as a single nation, with a language composed of a variety of dialects, and accordingly envisioned Slavic culture as the third constituency of the empire. Prešeren engaged in a dispute with Kopitar in favor of a distinct Slovene identity and refused the reinvention of the script proposed under Kopitar's influence by Franc Serafin Metelko and Peter Dajnko in 1824 and 1825. The conflict was resolved in the 1830s, and a decade later Prešeren refuted the Illyric movement that strove to amalgamate the Slovene and Croat people through language to create a stronger nation. His claim to a particularly Slovene cultural identity has never been seriously challenged, although various forms of Pan-Slavism outlived the century. Unification under the Serbian crown after the World War I made the national trinity (Serbian–Croat–Slovene) a political requirement. Janko Kos extended this threat to identity to communist rule because the nation was then supposed to melt back into the international proletaria through "brotherhood and unity" (Kos 1996, p. 18).

The enlightened, centralized absolutist state implemented the first program of general education to increase literacy, improve on the agrarian economy, and expand the pool for recruitment into the imperial administration apparatus. The introduction of the first public school system (by imperial decree in 1774) enjoining the use of the local language mapped the national territory and created the audience for and the followers of Romantic nationalist ideas. The actual mass movement could start only after the abolition of land bondage in 1848 and the improvement of the transportation infrastructure. The political leaders were the literati. Only at the time of the so-called camps between 1868 and 1871 — political gatherings that brought together tens of thousands of participants — was the political mission gradually transferred onto professional politicians. The moral authority remained with writers such as Fran Levstik (1831–1887) and Josip Stritar (1836–1923).

The difficulty of identification was aggravated by the notion of the purity and unity of the nation. Throughout the century, the idiom "Slovene people" described only the peasant folk: the natural, authentic, good, and morally invincible people patronized by its social and cultural elites, united in common resistance to the foreign (German) assimilation. Fran Levstik still insisted on this vision of the people. Because language had become the principal criterion of identification, anything else was strange (and, under the threat of Germanization, even hostile), making it impossible to integrate cultural diversity, current cultural production, and cultural heritage. For instance, the imperial regulation of construction in the nineteenth century spread the work of Vienna-based architects throughout the empire, which unified the look of public edifices. That phenomenon could never constitute a part of the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 184150307X
• ISBN 13: 9781841503073
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 120
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland