Koncepti i tjetrit në letërsinë shqipe: çfarë e kemi tjetrin - Një studim krahasimtar
The other in literature: what is the other - A comparative study

Summary/Abstract: This article emphasizes the image of the other in Albanian literature, more specifically in the novel The General of the Dead Army by Kadare and the novel Living in the Island by Ben Blushi, while providing examples out of world literature from particular works such as Kundera’s Ignorance, Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Coetze’s Slow Man. In the novel Ignorance, Milan Kundera refers to “the great archetypal return” – i.e. he unfolds the myth of the return depicted here as emigrant nostalgia which manifests with ignorance and loss. Instances will be retrieved from Blushi’s Living in the Island in order to study the (cultural) rapport of the Albanian with the other and the thematic concern of this close and friendly relation, Constantinople at the time of its thriving. If spectacular examples of fear and phobia from the lesser numbers are exhausting in the domain of politics, the other in world literature and in Albanian literature is not the enemy; he usually is the same as us, or at least a guest. Man strived to find the answer to the rhetorical question: who is my true enemy? It is as if the fabrication of the guardian enemy that can usually be seen in the other (the past an an anxiety and fear or the new as an idea, an unknown) is a derivation of fear and paranoia that we are surrounded by enemies or that we are being followed, or it is merely monopolizing of language by those in power in order to secure the loyalty of their citizens. He constantly talks of a fictive enemy (national, state, ideological, religious, stratous, political...) but made concrete through the attribute ‘other’. Apart from some classical works of Albanian literarure and especially some of the works of Ismail Kadare where the other is regarded with contempt (The Great Winter), although in The General of the Dead Army this author is more careful than in the other novels and essays where the Turks, the Greeks, the Serbs are despised and treated with contempt, forming clichés that through media and ideologically interpreted historiography reach the level of nomos, but in fact are stereotypes that create collective thinking of the other even for a man who has never had any interaction or experience with the other in the Kosovar context, for instance an ethnic Albanian with a Serbian Kosovar and vice versa. In this trail will be conveyed a comparative challenge between four cultures through the study of five novels (two out of Albanian literature and three out of world literature) in order to affirm the hypothesis that in literature we are all alike.

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