National Canon Research Articles

Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature ed. by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller

Reviewed by: Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature ed. by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller Mike Cadden (bio) Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature. Edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller. New York: Routledge, 2017. In this recent entry in the Routledge Children’s Literature and Culture series, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller present to the reader thirteen takes on the process as well as the product of canonization. Like Kümmerling-Meibauer and Elina Druker’s recent ChLA Edited Book Award–winning Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde (2015), which was based on a 2012 conference of the same name, this collection grew out of an eponymous conference held at the University of Tübingen in 2014. Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature also shares with the previous volume a clarity of mission and a wider appeal than its title might suggest. The preface tells the reader that “This volume focuses on the (de)canonization process in children’s literature, considering the construction and cultural-historical changes of canons in different children’s literatures,” and that “Particular emphasis is given to sociological canon theories, which have so far been under-represented in canon research in children’s literature” (n. pag.). The editors’ introduction revisits some familiar arguments about the relationship and tensions between children’s and adult literature as literary categories and then offers observations about canon formation to get us thinking: for example, the observation that “in general, theoretical approaches [End Page 104] to canons and canonization largely follow either socio-cultural or aesthetic perspectives” (2). The volume offers a brief “prelude” by Peter Hunt. Clever and amusing, his new version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” serves as a parody of both canon dynamics and the participants in this process. This piece could actually serve to inspire undergraduates to think about the politics and dynamics of canon formation. Part 1, “Canons, Cultural Capital and Policies of Community Building,” mostly focuses on the shifting of national canons over the course of a few decades. The chapters share the interesting narrative context of providing an account of forming a canon in a country that has recently come into being. In her study of Israel’s canon formation, for example, Yael Darr argues that “when dealing with nation building and literary canons, distinction should be drawn between older and more ground-breaking dimensions; that is, between what is presented as a traditional canon and the innovative, pioneering one” (24). Michael Düring’s essay shows “Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as a children’s classic in the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1937 as a part of a state-managed process” of the ideological education of children (Introduction 7). Müller, Simone Herrmann, and Franziska Burstyn argue in their study of the British canon of children’s literature that “texts considered as canonical share not only aesthetic features but also a collective understanding of cultural values” (39). Kimberley Reynolds’s essay on the socialist-to-establishment career of Geoffrey Trease dovetails with the others in its focus on the shifts of national political winds and the formation of canons. Rounding out this section is Anna Maria Czernow and Dorota Michutka’s essay on the Polish children’s canon from independence in 1918, to the People’s Republic of Poland in 1945, to the end of communism in 1989. All show how over the course of only a few decades, the canon and its politics and attendant aesthetics were marked by drastic shifts. Part 2 explores “The Challenges of the Canon: Genre, Gender, Avant-garde.” Helene Høyrup examines how Hans Christian Andersen’s use of dual address made him successful with both children and adults in a number of different countries. She argues that “the dual address mode in conjunction with a more adult agenda is one of the features that trigger creative innovation in Andersen’s tales. Thereby he enters a more general Romantic-modernist line” (113). Kümmerling-Meibauer questions why children’s books inspired by the avant-garde, particularly in Germany, are considered “singular oddities within the history...

El manuscrito moderno y la "idea Bécquer"

This article offers a historical ontology of the modern manuscript taking Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's Libro de los gorriones as its object of study. It analyzes the different representational and institutional processes by which a particular literary autograph becomes a cultural commodity as a text as much as an object. Drawing from Walter Benjamin's work, and making use in particular of his ideas about aura and trace, this article blends material studies and textual criticism to follow Bécquer's manuscript through markets, mythic and bibliographic accounts, national libraries and the academia. In the final analysis, this essay examines the relation between the materiality of texts and the formation of a national canon, and, more specifically, between the genealogy of the paradigmatic romantic manuscript and the coming into being of the very idea of its author.

Feminist Processes and Performance: Interventions in Anamika Haksar's Antar Yatra

Since independence, theatre in India has been touted as a platform to foster a sense of national community and exhibit the ideal citizen. The new theatre, and official cultural-policy documents since independence, prescribed ways to become an ideal citizen–actor of a new nation's cultural manifestation. A conscious modification and disruption of the post-independence national canon, as I argue in this essay, came in the late 1980s from a group of teachers and directors with a gendered sensibility. The essay will focus on the unique performance and theatre-making processes of these women directors, with Anamika Haksar's Antar Yatra being the case study. The question it will raise is, how successful was Haksar in decentring the various hierarchies? Could her collaborative work engage her students as co-creators of knowledge rather than as citizens created out of hegemonic pedagogy, conditioned by the state's national identity politics?

Lessons in writing the biography of the crossover poet, Olga Kirsch

Olga Kirsch was an English-speaking Jewess who wrote and published poetry in Afrikaans. As such she exemplifies a crossover poet who introduces the voice of the other into a national canon in her case, the only Jewish voice in Afrikaans poetry. Three questions were raised in the research and writing of her biography. The first concerns the extent to which she, as a Jew, was influenced by the dominant culture in which she grew up. The second seems more complex: What influence has Olga Kirsch had on the dominant culture was she able to influence the South African Afrikaans culture and literature in any way? Third, to what extent does the multi-culturalism of Kirsch affect the process of research and writing her biography; are there problems specific to writing the biography of a cross-cultural writer?

Changing Spaces: Canonization of Anglophone World Literature

AbstractCanonization, understood broadly as the complex processes in which some works and authors obtain a privileged position in literary culture, while others become less and less visible, takes place continually in the interplay between preferences among readers, critics and institutions. These can now be studied better thanks to new digital resources and social media. The canonization of world literatures is particularly complex as it traverses notions of national canons and sits uneasily between integration with Western literature and a counter-canonical stance. This article considers the uses of a differentiated view on canonization and how data resources that have been made available on the circulation and readership of authors can be used to qualify canonization. The relationship between the locally and globally oriented Anglophone writers and the growing importance of migrant writers is investigated, as well as the influence of world literature in English which is included for its influence not only on Anglophone canons but also canons of non-English literary cultures.

Portuguese knights-errant in nineteenth-century Paris and Rio: translation as response to exile in global cities

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2017v37n1p159O presente artigo procura explorar a forma como um corpus de romances picarescos traduzidos para português e publicados em Paris em meados do século XIX poderá ter intentado ajudar a diáspora portuguesa a lidar com o desafio de ser migrante numa cidade global. Através da análise contextual, argumentar-se-á que estes romances formaram parte de projetos culturais mais latos com o objetivo de estabelecer redes de solidariedade entre os exilados portugueses em Paris e, ao mesmo tempo, de conservar o multilinguismo na comunidade migrante. Através da análise textual da obra Dom Severino Magriço ou o Dom Quichote Portuguez (Paris, Pillet Fils Aîné, 1851), defender-se-á, primeiramente, que este texto parece mostrar um compromisso em falar para os exiladosabsolutistas portugueses em Paris e, provavelmente, no Rio de Janeiro. Depois, tentar-se-á demonstrar que a diegese deste romance apresenta formas de dialogar com múltiplos Outros. Concretamente, este texto de chegada, inspirado na obra de Cervantes e formado por fragmentos traduzidos de diferentes textos de partida, parece aconselhar o leitor a, por um lado, não ter medo do desconhecido e, por outro, conhecer os vizinhos globais através da leitura e comparação de cânones literários nacionais.

A Mediterranean gap in the national canon? Paul Carpita’s anti-colonial cinema between militant amateurism and New Wave

A new Marseille cinema, focusing on the city’s everyday culture, emerged in the 1980s with directors such as René Allio and Robert Guédiguian. Even though some of their films received considerable recognition, an important part of the history of this cinematic representation has remained largely unaccounted for: the work of Paul Carpita (1922–2009). His films of the 1950s and 60s are strongly linked to the cultural history of the labour and peace movement. A former member of the Resistance, he created just after World War II Le Rendez-vous des quais/Meeting on the Docks (1953–55), a full-length film shot in the popular quarters of Marseille, thematising the dockers’ protest against the Indochina War. The film was censored before its release and only restored in the 1980s. This article situates the film within the regional and national French cinema of the post-war era, and analyses its hybrid aesthetics, comprising cinematic realism, militant cinema and amateur film. By referring to Carpita’s more intimate and reflexive short films, the article argues that his marginal status within French film history can be traced to the political and amateurish character of his films, but also to the fact that his artistic activity was located in Marseille, at the periphery of the national film scene and academia.

The aspects of ideological discourse in the literature for children and the young

The paper deals with some aspects of the presence of ideological discourse in literary works for children and the young from a diachronic perspective, showing that this field of literature is not deprived of ideology. After identifying the forms in which ideological aspects appear in literary texts, we will consider the pedagogical discourse as a way to exert a corrective influence on young readers. We will then point out the impact of the state cultural and educational policy on literary texts, as a way of influencing the adoption of a dominant social ideology by young readers. This form of ideological discourse is conditioned by the state system, which means that the establishment of the Yugoslav identity among young readers was carried out within the royalist context in the period of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and in the context of the socialist ideology in the SFRY period. We will provide examples to illustrate how, apart from the dominant ideology, subversive literary texts based on the critical presentation of the reality were written as well with the aim of destabilising the state system (both in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). The post-Yugoslav period witnessed a decanonisation of the Yugoslav literary corpus and the formation of the national canons, while some writers, who used to be a part of the common cultural heritage, were marginalised in some national corpora or received a dual canonisation. The traps of ideological inferences will be presented at the end of the paper. All forms of ideological discourse previously discussed in the paper illustrate the complexity of the ideological discourse in literature and emphasise the importance of careful and critical reading of literary texts.

National Dances in the Canon of Polish Culture

Abstract The following dances are most commonly considered nowadays as national dances (or emblems of Polish national culture): the polonaise, the mazur, the krakowiak, the oberek and the kujawiak. These dances form the cultural canon as defined by Andrzej Szpociński (i.e. a constantly revised part of tradition which carries significance outside the domain of dance and is obligatory for all the community members). In Polish musicological studies it has been emphasised that the phenomenon of stereotypisation of native folklore has played a major role in the formation and emergence of emblematic national phenomena. However, some of the phenomena and processes that have taken place during the formation and revision of the national canon cannot be reduced to the idea of creating a stereotype. The author of this paper draws on Maria Janion’s treatment of the categories of myth and phantasm, which can be much more useful for the interpretation especially of borderline or clearly alien phenomena that have frequently found their way into the Polish national dance canon and played a very important role in that canon. The author also discusses the changing functions of dances from the canon, which resulted from external circumstances determined by political events and social processes.

Palestinian Writings in the World: A Polylingual Literary Category Between Local and Transnational Realms

In this article I focus on the problems and possible consequences deriving from putting together literary productions from the Americas, Europe and Israel by Palestinian authors and authors of Palestinian descent who may write in languages other than Arabic. Due to their daily engagement in the languages of local majorities, literature from these distinct contexts is commonly characterized by the authors’ attempts at preserving cultural boundaries and exploring national identities both against the backdrop and under the influence of foreign cultural elements. I present critical readings of Anglophone, Latinate and Hebrew literary productions to facilitate my proposal for the necessity of establishing a polylingual literary category to include these texts in the national canon, and suggest a theoretical framework for reading them within both local and transnational contexts as well as alongside Palestinian literary productions composed in Arabic.

Theatre and the Publics of Democracy: Between Melodrama and Rational Realism

The theatre that developed in late nineteenth-century India, especially in the Bengal and Maharashtra regions, catered to an audience that was much wider than the new educated middle-class males who introduced the European stage form in Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune. Driven by private capital, the new Indian theatre adopted the melodrama as its main dramatic form. When performance capital shifted to the more lucrative field of cinema in the middle of the twentieth century, the melodramatic form again became the chief narrative mode. Such is its power that it has become the principal rhetorical form of popular democracy in India. In the decades after independence, theatre was rescued from imminent death by the support provided by state agencies which sponsored the production of a national theatre canon and style, as opposed to the prevailing regional ones. However, with bureaucratization and political interference, theatre in India today must revert to its one inherent superiority over the cinema – the immediacy of its encounter with small audiences.

Introduction: Beyond Dutch Design: Material Culture in the Netherlands in an Age of Globalization, Migration and Multiculturalism

Over the years, many things have been called Dutch design, starting with national industrial exhibitions in the early nineteenth century and continuing in the last quarter of that century with debates about what constituted a characteristically Dutch style in the applied arts and Art Nouveau. Later, similar discussions were held about the typically Dutch character of De Stijl and later Dutch industrial design. Internationally, Dutch design gained acclaim with graphic design in the 1970s and in the 1990s, with the Dutch organization Droog Design. Since then, unexpected things started being labelled Dutch design. In today’s age of globalization, migration and multiculturalism, Dutch design operates transnationally, comprising foreign objects, subjects and practices in the Netherlands and abroad. By drawing on recent discussions on national canons and critiques of methodological nationalism, this special issue proposes alternatives for a more dynamic understanding of Dutch design and national design canons. As such, it builds on scholarship problematizing Dutch design and contributes to wider debates on the transnationalism of national design histories.

Translation and the making of modern Russian literature

Translation and making of modern Russian literature, by Brian James Baer, New York, NY, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, 224 pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 978-1628927986The birthplace of Russian poetry, according poet and religious philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev, was Vasilii Zhukovsky's 1802 of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Thus opens Brian James Baer's incisive monograph on nearly 200 years of Russian and Soviet translation, drawing our attention graveyard as melancholy point of origin, and as fundamentally constitutive of Russian literary creativity - and by extension, identity - in context of Romantic cult of originality. Baer writes:Russia's belated entry into European cultural scene following Peter Great's policy of forced Westernization in early eighteenth century, which resulted in an intense accumulation of cultural capital - accomplished largely through translations and adaptations - occurred at precisely time when Romanticism was positing original genius as defining characteristic of literary texts - and of nations. (3)While imitative and synthetic nature of Russian culture sounds a familiar story, shifting lens focus on forces us, as Baer puts it in one cogent formulation, to rethink nature of identity itself in nonessentialist, fundamentally relational terms (15). His archly intelligent critical take makes a vital intervention at heart of Russian literary studies, undermining any illusions of a stable national canon and simultaneously calling into sharp question what it is that we talk about when we talk about Russian literature.Baer's accomplishments in Translation and Making of Modern Russian Literature are many. He moves with dexterity from discussions of respective strategies of nation versus empire, reading several works of Russian literature as staging essential incompatibility of two (9), questioning why seminars on nineteenth-century Russian culture fail make mention of Mikhail Mikhailov, whose translations of Heine and of US antislavery poetry played such an enormous role in political life of Russia in 1860s and in consolidation of radical left (14). Equally probing are his points about critical silence on generation of Russian women who wrote in French and on invisibility of (female) translators generally (see especially Chapter 4, Refiguring Translation, 87-113). The book even darts into twenty-first century with an astute analysis of popularity of - a white-washed and de-sexed - Oscar Wilde in post-Soviet Russia; and an equally sharp critique of Liudmila Ulitskaya's novel Daniel Stein, which was taken as a postmodern paean tolerance and inclusion by readers of English translation, but thinly disguises both homophobia and Russian essentialism in Russian original (19-20).If anything, main thesis argued in Translation and Making of Modern Russian Literature is convincing enough tempt readers expand it globally, especially given epigram by Tomas Venclova that the literature of most nations begins with translation (1) and nods World Literature via references David Damrosch, Emily Apter, and Pascale Casanova. …

Writers' Lives for the Nation: Karl Gutzkow's Author Biographies and the German Book Market

The rise of the professional author in the mid-nineteenth century was accompanied by serious concerns about the future of national literature. As market pressures and censorship increasingly shaped the landscape of literary production, post-patronage writing thematized the plight of the author. This article focuses on the work of Karl Gutzkow (1811–78), who as a professional writer campaigned for authors’ rights and insisted on the need to support new talent instead of fixating on memorialization. Through a consideration of Gutzkow's writings on prominent as well as marginalized German authors, the article traces his development of a theory for writing Künstlerromane and -novellen focusing specifically on historic authors. Finally, a reading of Gutzkow's fictionalized Rousseau biography Wie kam es, daß Rousseau seine Kinder aussetzte? reveals that Gutzkow put this theory into practice with a view to exposing the material hardships that could compromise an author's ability to produce serious literature worthy of the national canon. Rather than celebrating literary heroes of the past, the Künstlernovelle becomes a political statement: a literary genre with the potential to effect change by shining a light on the material obstacles to authorial success.

Architecture from the Swedish Era in Finnish Art Historical Dissertations: A Case Study

SummaryFinland was a part of Sweden until the war of 1808–1809, and the buildings erected during the Swedish rule are arguably a part of both countries common history of architecture. However, research in architecture from before 1809 is not very common in Finnish art historical dissertations. The aim of this study is to examine reasons for why the architecture from the so-called “Swedish era” has not been examined to a greater extent in Finnish art historical research. A main hypothesis is that doctoral research on architecture has been directed towards themes related to the nationalistic canon, which have a focus on the historical development after 1809. The study is based on a historiographic examination of all art historical dissertations on architecture, and the statistics on research subjects are contextualised through a comparison of the choices of subjects with the development of ideology in Finnish art history and art canon. The survey shows that it is possible to connect the statistic results to the development of ideologies and values in Finnish art history. The ongoing focus on constructing a national canon of art during the nineteenth and twentieth century affected the definition of what could be seen as architecture, and most of all, as Finnish architecture.

The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv and Soviet Lviv

Iryna Sklokina outlines an agenda for the discussion of Tarik Cyril Amar’s book The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv. She praises the book as a successful attempt to challenge the established national canon of Ukrainian historiography that tends to downplay topics such as the collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazis or the modernizing and nationalizing aspect of Soviet rule. Amar’s application of colonial optics helps to elucidate the dialectics of the development of contemporary Ukrainian identity as a product of both the official institutions of the Soviet state and popular resistance to them.

Comparing and Connecting: the Rise of Fast Historiography in Latin and Vernacular (Twelfth to Thirteenth Century)

This contribution proposes to compare, but also to connect, the rise of a new type of unlearned historical report, ›fast historiography‹, in Latin and vernacular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Connections are suggested by combining the characteristics of such writing with book and library history as well with social history. New roles of book writing coincided with a larger social spread among authors as well as with a new library horizon – books now began to circulate at higher speed, in greater numbers and in less solemn circumstances. These possibilities were exploited and pushed forward both in Latin and vernacular historiography. This connection has been overlooked for several reasons, primarily because Latin and vernacular literatures are often considered each on their own terms, compartmentalized into two ›traditions‹ in which Latin seems to bear an automatic tag as learned and ecclesiastical. But this is not the case with Gesta Francorum, Galbert of Bruges, Raol (on the conquest of Lisbon), Caffaro, Henry of Livonia etc. – they all resemble the simple account in French of Robert de Clari and others. Related to this argument, the article opens with reflections on canons and paradigms of European medieval historiography (in papal Europe) and suggests that comparisons and connections always spring from certain strong national canons and that the questions they are devised to answer are to a large degree determined by such canonical series. Indirectly the article is therefore also an experiment with comparisons outside the dominant national canons and between non-canonical pieces.

The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature by Barbara Fuchs (review)

fuchs, barbara. The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. 186 pp.More than a generation has passed since Walter Cohen's Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (1985) began inspiring us to challenge the truisms of Anglo-Spanish literary history by viewing national canons commonly regarded as ''rival'' in relationship rather than primarily in isolation. The subsequent accumulation of monographs, journal articles, edited volumes, institutes, conference panels, and dissertations suggests that ''Anglo-Hispanists'' now comprise a growing subfield within early modern studies. Among those who have energized this ''Spanish Connection,'' Barbara Fuchs has been the most prolific and visible, and so the arrival of her work on the occlusion of Spain in English literary history, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, has been eagerly awaited.Fuchs's introduction immediately brings the project into material focus. To my mind, the point that the English drew inspiration from Spanish literature-''even at the times of greatest rivalry between the two nations'' (1)-could not be made more effectively than with the accompanying reproduction of the Spanish reading list of Gabriel Harvey, the Cambridge-educated Latinist, Hispanophile, and improver of the English language, who has been most often remembered as a promoter of Edmund Spenser's poetry. As Fuchs observes, the titles Harvey jotted down on the flyleaf of his personal copy of Antonio de Corro's The Spanish Grammar (1590)-including Lazarillo de Tormes, Juan Huarte de San Juan's Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, Jorge Montemayor's Diana, the Petrarchan poetry of Juan Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega, as well as ''other legends of chivalry and errant knights''-''would still belong on a master's exam in Spanish Golden Age literature'' (3).Harvey's interest in Spanish language and letters should not seem especially surprising. If England and Spain were often at odds in the early modern period, they also shared a long history of dynastic alliance, commercial exchange, and cultural connection. However, largely due to the ensuing institutionalization of literary study around our modern vernaculars, the transnational nature of the Anglo-Spanish literary relationship has often gone unrecognized. By demonstrating that ''the often vociferous rhetorical denunciation of Spain in the period and beyond did not impede literary traffic'' (4), Fuchs sets out to offer a corrective to modes of analysis emphasizing native traditions at the expense of broader patterns of interchange.The book's first chapter, ''Forcible Translation,'' observes how humanist notions of copia, imitatio, and translatio could take on a martial tenor during the highly nationalistic Elizabethan years, so that its second, ''Knights and Merchants,'' can demonstrate how these processes worked, especially in relation to the drama, during the more openly Hispanophilic reign of James I. English literature's extensive debt to Cervantes comes early to the stage via Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), which one contemporary observed as ''a sort of Quixot [sic] on the Stage'' (39). Long a staple of Renaissance drama surveys, the play's allusiveness to Don Quixote has often seemed apparent to readers acquainted with Cervantes's masterwork. And yet, generations of English scholars have downplayed the possibility of a Spanish connection by insisting that Beaumont's play had been an independent development ''satirizing the same chivalric romances'' (43). As Fuchs rightly observes, even if there were no Cervantine intertextual presence within The Knight of the Burning Pestle-and I wholeheartedly believe that she is right to insist that there is-the romances the play satirizes themselves demonstrate Spanish influence. And yet, Fuchs argues, patterns of critical denial have indicated an attempt ''to contain Spanish influence in an effort to promote a national English canon that seems to depend on a refusal of influence, or its transmutation into a triumphant appropriation'' (42). …

“Blame These Days, Don’t Blame Me!”: Rewriting Medieval Arabic in Maghrebi National Literature and Drama

This article examines two crucial moments of literary adaptation in twentieth-century North Africa, when Classical Arabic prose takes on a central but rarely acknowledged position in emerging national arts. Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī and al-Ṭayyib al-Ṣiddīqī destabilize the accepted critical account of Arabic literature’s modernization. Whereas literary historians have argued that writers eschewed restrictive Classical forms and Arabized Western genres, al-Masʿadī and al-Ṣiddīqī directly apply Prophetic ḥadīth and humorous maqāmāt to the novel and drama. Their gesture toward medieval prose gives them an ethical master key, allowing them to engage pious Islamic discourse and shift abruptly to the disingenuous, pragmatic world of the maqāmāt. However, in the charged field of national literature, their maneuvers provide them substantially less comfort than they seek. Presenting their ambitious modern prose as Classical, they force a broad variety of genres into a single continuum of Arab-Islamic identity. Such a historiography requires that we parse the categories that al-Masʿadī and al-Ṣiddīqī conjoin, a challenge largely unmet amidst the accolades they have received over the past five decades. Al-Masʿadī and al-Ṣiddīqī deepen the anxiety of form that they assiduously attempt to relieve. The Arabic novel and drama, although portrayed in criticism as the iconoclast tools of modernity, drive these authors deep into torturous examinations of the literary past. Maghrebi literature exposes the enduring rifts between centuries-old narrative traditions and the urgent task of forming national canons during an era of political independence.

Borislav Pekić’s New textuality in the light of Bakhtin's concept of the open text of the polyphonic novel

In this paper I analyze two of Pekić’s novels in the light of Bakhtin’s concept of the open text of the polyphonic novel which Pekić develops by means of a new Narrator Figure and a new poetics based on an encyclopedic embedded text structure. Among several literary techniques developed from the beginnings of Pekić’s writing, crucial importance belongs to what I call the Explicit Narrator Figure (for instance, in The Time of Miracles, 1965), who speaks in his own voice as interpreter of found texts, and the Implicit Narrator Figure, who adopts the literary and non-literary voices of (many) others, to whose diction and style he assimilates his own voice (for example, in Pilgrimage of Arsenije Njegovan, 1970). This new (postmodern) narrator figure, both explicit and implicit, acts as an interpreter of «found» texts. What connects these two types of Narrator Figures is the document and related Embedded Narration: both narrators thus deal with the pre-texts as well as texts-in-texts, levels and layers of texts, proto-texts and meta-texts – various types of Framed/Embedded Narratives. The Implicit Narrator Figure deals with Biblical witnessed texts and the Explicit Narrator Figure uses personal testamentary texts. In such a way, both Implicit and Explicit Narrator Figures become the researchers of different types of literary and non-literary documents. These complex inter-textual explorations of the “library” of culture are “encyclopedic” in magnitude and reveal, in combination with the new Narrator Figure’s status as Editor and Interpreter, a new type of narrative text, constituted in the encyclopedic open novel structure. Pekić thus introduces a new form of inter-textuality into Serbian literature, implicitly extending Bakhtin’s (and Dostoevsky’s) legacy by drawing on the Serbian national literary canon and the entire Western cultural “library”.