Projects / Programmes
May ’68 in Literature and Theory: The Last Season of Modernism in France, Slovenia, and the World
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 6.07.00 |
Humanities |
Literary sciences |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| H000 |
Humanities |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| 6.02 |
Humanities |
Languages and Literature |
student movement, modernism, neo-avant-garde, theory and literature, world-system, 1968-1972
Researchers (9)
| no. |
Code |
Name and surname |
Research area |
Role |
Period |
No. of publicationsNo. of publications |
| 1. |
21450 |
PhD Marijan Dović |
Literary sciences |
Researcher |
2018 - 2022 |
603 |
| 2. |
00840 |
PhD Aleš Gabrič |
Historiography |
Researcher |
2018 - 2022 |
864 |
| 3. |
30792 |
PhD Jernej Habjan |
Literary sciences |
Researcher |
2018 - 2022 |
196 |
| 4. |
34595 |
PhD Andraž Jež |
Literary sciences |
Researcher |
2018 - 2022 |
121 |
| 5. |
06442 |
PhD Marko Juvan |
Literary sciences |
Head |
2018 - 2022 |
740 |
| 6. |
01397 |
PhD Alenka Koron |
Humanities |
Researcher |
2018 - 2022 |
257 |
| 7. |
54766 |
Lucija Mandić |
Literary sciences |
Junior researcher |
2020 - 2022 |
36 |
| 8. |
32376 |
PhD Mojca Šorli |
Linguistics |
Researcher |
2020 - 2022 |
114 |
| 9. |
28250 |
PhD Andrejka Žejn |
Humanities |
Researcher |
2020 - 2022 |
94 |
Organisations (2)
Abstract
May ’68 in Literature and Theory: The Last Season of Modernism in France, Slovenia, and the World
The proposed research project will intervene in the study of the global student and labor movement that erupted in May 1968 by systematically analyzing two largely neglected but key aspects: the dimensions of the literary and of the semi-peripheral. The project will analyze how critical theory and late modernist, neo-avant-garde literature were related to these protests, which, opposing institutional politics of the late sixties and early seventies, struggled for the socio-economic transformation of both the capitalist world-system and its second-world socialist alternative.
Neo-avant-garde literature and theory broke with both the bourgeois and the socialist versions of the institution of art, including with the respective canonical interpretations of literature in mainstream humanities and the school apparatus. Thus, literature and theory, regardless of their differences ([post]structuralist theory’s antihumanism vs. literature’s postexistentialist individualism), opened the possibility of taking the utopian-transformative impulse from the realm of thought into political action, and from concepts and aesthetic feelings into everyday life. The project will compare developments in capitalist Paris, the core of the modern literary world-system and the global exporter of theory, and in socialist Ljubljana, a literary semi-periphery that nevertheless kept up with France by producing a theory that came to be recognized worldwide (the Ljubljana School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis) and a literary and artistic neo-avant-garde that, together with other contributions from the global (semi-)periphery, revitalized the immunized modernism of the Western core (e.g., the ludism and conceptualism of the OHO group).
The project starts from the hypothesis that in Slovenia, a republic of the non-aligned and self-managed socialist Yugoslavia, the critique expressed or inspired by the student movement in the United States and Western and Eastern Europe has, perhaps more clearly than anywhere else, shifted from the political field to the field of culture and literature. As the last phase of modernism faded together with the student and labor movement, this was followed in the core of the world-system by postmodernism in aesthetics and neo-conservatism in politics. And in Slovenia and other Yugoslav republics, the last season of modernism was followed by the socioeconomic and cultural crisis of the self-management experiment, the bloody disintegration of the federation, and the emergence of independent successor states. The project will answer the question of how the conjuncture of 1968, whose struggle to transform the world seemed to have failed, led to that of 1989, which did transform the world by announcing the end of the utopia that had inspired 1968. To this end, the project will produce and, applying the most advanced approaches in digital humanities, analyze the archive of Slovenian literary and theoretical production of the period. The focus will be on the question of transformations in four distinct yet closely interconnected social spheres: the national and literary language; the relationship between literature and visual arts; the generational structure of the public sphere; and the patriarchal structures of post-war society.
Significance for science
The project will be able to intervene in the scholarship on May ’68 (which is expected to gain new strength with the 50th anniversary) by adding to it two crucial dimensions: the literary and the semi-peripheral. This has the potential to sophisticate the state of the art and its focus on the geopolitics of the metropoles in the core of the world-system (Paris, New York, Berlin) and in the Soviet-influenced periphery (Prague, Warsaw).
Outside the scholarship on May ’68, the project has the potential to contribute significantly to emerging critical studies of Yugoslavia, where the focus has been on the revolution of 1989 rather than on May ’68, on post-1989 Yugo-nostalgia rather than on pre-1989 modernist culture, and on economic rather than cultural dimensions of self-management.
The project’s results will contribute to the study of the widely underresearched role of literature and critical theory in the social movements of the 1960s. They will shed new light on modernism in the period of Cold-War détente and global antisystemic movements along the core–periphery axis. For the first time, Slovenian material will be systematically collected and analyzed, thus enabling an understanding of the relation between theory and literature in a geopolitically specific society in the periphery of the literary world-system. These findings will be key not only to Slovenian literary studies, which has yet to systematically analyze the 1960 and 70s, but also to Yugoslav studies and comparative studies of East-Central Europe. Comparative studies have already recognized May ’68 as a historical juncture (Neubauer & Cornis-Pope), as they have 1989, which the proposed project takes into consideration as well.
Significance for the country
The project will be able to intervene in the scholarship on May ’68 (which is expected to gain new strength with the 50th anniversary) by adding to it two crucial dimensions: the literary and the semi-peripheral. This has the potential to sophisticate the state of the art and its focus on the geopolitics of the metropoles in the core of the world-system (Paris, New York, Berlin) and in the Soviet-influenced periphery (Prague, Warsaw).
Outside the scholarship on May ’68, the project has the potential to contribute significantly to emerging critical studies of Yugoslavia, where the focus has been on the revolution of 1989 rather than on May ’68, on post-1989 Yugo-nostalgia rather than on pre-1989 modernist culture, and on economic rather than cultural dimensions of self-management.
The project’s results will contribute to the study of the widely underresearched role of literature and critical theory in the social movements of the 1960s. They will shed new light on modernism in the period of Cold-War détente and global antisystemic movements along the core–periphery axis. For the first time, Slovenian material will be systematically collected and analyzed, thus enabling an understanding of the relation between theory and literature in a geopolitically specific society in the periphery of the literary world-system. These findings will be key not only to Slovenian literary studies, which has yet to systematically analyze the 1960 and 70s, but also to Yugoslav studies and comparative studies of East-Central Europe. Comparative studies have already recognized May ’68 as a historical juncture (Neubauer & Cornis-Pope), as they have 1989, which the proposed project takes into consideration as well.
Most important scientific results
Interim report
Most important socioeconomically and culturally relevant results
Interim report
