Slovene Literature and Social Changes: National State, Democracy and Transitional Discrepancies

This research project is based on the observation that the role of Slovene literature and literary culture in the process of Slovene democratisation and establishment of statehood has yet to be examined by an interdisciplinary study capable of assuming both the aesthetic and the historical perspective while giving a comparative account of the place of literature in the post-1991 era, when Slovenia reached statehood after the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The project claims that the key to understanding Slovene contemporary literature and culture is to be found in the developments of the 1980s. These developments require a multi-layered approach in which the aesthetic, cultural and political levels of the problem are viewed both separately and in their historical overdetermination. Such an interdisciplinary approach is also dictated by the structural specificities of the problematic. For in the 1980s, Slovenia and many other regions of Central and Eastern Europe have become sites of multiple simultaneous social, ideological and aesthetic processes. The project addresses these transitional intersections with their correspondences between literature and ideology, ethics and politics, democracy and authoritarianism, traditionalism and cosmopolitanism. In order to grasp these intersections and the discrepancies they have produced, the project undertakes a novel reflection on the function of literature (as well as literary and cultural history) in the social construction of Slovene reality in the decades prior to and after state independence.