Marcello Potocco, Nacionalni imaginariji ... - Pedagoški inštitut

248Nacionalni imaginariji – Literarni imaginarijibe understood as one of the realisations of the so called “northern frontier”and therefore as a continuation of Frye’s definition of the Canadianfounding myth.Following Castoriadis’ theory of social imaginary, as well as Frye’sand Ricœur’s concepts of the narrative construction of society, a similarnotion of a founding myth is discussed in regard to the Sloveniannational identification. The constitution of the founding myth is intertwinedwith material praxis and the so called stock responses (the termis Frye’s). The study shows some of the key mechanisms involved in theformation of Slovenian national identification, especially the feeling ofendangerment and the bifocality of identification, which are both understoodas typical stock responses in the Slovenian identity construction.As the 19th century and the rise of Jansenism were crucial in formingthese stock responses, the author gives a brief description of the ideologicaland the aesthetical basis of the magazine Kmetijske in rokodelskeNovice, which was established in 1848.Before attempting to describe some of the key factors for a particularlyforceful national interpellation in the Canadian and Slovenian literarysystems, Potocco focuses on the analysis of national literary history,especially against the grain of comparative literature. The crisis ofcomparative literature, which has often been hinted at after the publicationof Tötösy de Zepetnek’s Comparative Literature: Theory, Method,Application, has been affected by the rise of poststructuralism andthe anti-essentialist tendencies that led to converting Comparative Literatureinto Comparative Cultural Studies. Although this developmenthas to be ascribed also to pragmatic reasons, in Canada it may be attributedto the “emotional and intellectual primacy” of the nationally orientedresearch of literature. Despite its earlier beginnings, the urge todefine a single Canadian identity became dominant only in the 1960sand in the 1970s, with the criticism of N. Frye, and with the rise of nationalism,especially with the so called thematic criticism. Thematic criticswere widely attacked in the 1980s and later, but many of their commentatorsthemselves used the research of literature to reflect nationalidentity. Poststructuralist authors noted that, in the works of thematiccritics, literary criticism actually became cultural criticism. Both tendencies– research on mainly Canadian literature and the tendency towardscultural criticism – are also evident in studies of multiculturalism,although here cultural differences are set as the Canadian unifyingprinciple. Systemic and empirical approaches to literature took this as afertile ground for studying the intersections of Canadian literatures in