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The first chapter of the paper summarizes the devaluation process of the humanistic values that has begun in the West a few decades ago. The question is why and how the so-called knowledge societies marginalize humanistic knowledge. The second, third, and fourth chapters are the proposal of the mission of the humanities today: pushed out to society’s periphery, the humanities have the task of preserving skills, experiences, and knowledge that so-called knowledge society considers needless. Thereby, the paper advocates the importance of returning to philology, as Paul de Man puts it in his article Return to Philology, and tries to show the extent to which philology, ceasing to be national, becomes a communal, political and ethical force.
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Due to its geographic position and historical circumstances, Croatia is a country of deep regional differences. In this paper I try to remind the reader, on the one hand, of the inevitability of the regional perspective in approaching certain periods and, on the other hand, to find the answer to why regionalism can appear as an unpleasant methodology (and a fact?). I will refer to the terms related to regional narrative: geopoetics, regiopoetics, locality, glocality, homeland, boundaries, and so on, as well as the interrelationship of regional discourse with a discourse of memory and identity. The new regionalism (seems to me ‒ insufficiently present in Croatian literary research) as a part of cultural geography and cultural-anthropological research in cultural texts, explores the record of spatial experience and representation of space (region), as well as traces of action in the opposite direction: how a text of literature/culture influences the local context.
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Publication of a book of literary reviews Romani krize (The Novels of Crisis) by Igor Mandić in Belgrade in 1996, as well as the book promotion in Serbia, have been the subject of sharp attacks on its author in the Croatian media. In this “case,” which Mandić himself called “the chase of the collegial choir of elite commentators” for an “insignificant book of literary reviews,” several peripheral levels that are attempted to impose as dominant or to compete for a more favorable discursive position can be distinguished. First of all, the complex of peripheral is in the very status of literary criticism, the marginal letter, inferior to the prestigious discourses of belletristic and literary theory. However, as Mandić underlined in the foreword to The Novels of Crisis, this “by status wholly devalued writing, no matter how small, could always be used as a ‘symptom’ to raise some sort of ward-heeler’s alarm.” Regardless of the ironic modus of this attitude, the “ward-heeler alarm” that followed completely departed from the subject of this Mandić’s collection, or a decade of Serbian and Croatian literary productions, from the 80’s to the 90’s. Finally, precisely this literary period, which Mandić defined as a decade after the death of J. B. Tito and M. Krleža until the break-up of the SFRY, as the last decade of literary and cultural life in a common state, after its disintegration remained on the historical periphery of newly established national canons. However, the most important peripheral level of the whole of this “case” is concerned with the approach to the body of texts that this book deals with, i.e. a comparative study of Serbian and Croatian literature. At the time it was published in 1996, from peripheral cultural positions the comparative approach to the Croatian and Serbian literature was perceived as a radical political provocation that comes from the common past, in the wake of its renewal. In this work special attention is given to Mandić’s choice of Serbian and Croatian literary titles, hence to the very content of the Novels of Crisis. However, since the cultural context of this book goes beyond the literary criticism of the decade to which it relates, its significance is looked into from the aspect of polemical discourses this book produced, even at the periphery of the Croatian nineties.
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After the breakup of Yugoslavia and the “abduction” of Yugoslav name by the regime of Slobodan Milošević, it seemed that Yugoslavism is a concept solely belonging to the past. Yugoslavism lost its national-integrational role it used to have in the 19th century, as well as its privileged status of the state ideology, which it used to enjoy in both incarnations of Yugoslavia. However, at the dawn of 21st century several Croatian intellectuals – with historian and publicist Dragan Markovina at the forefront – strive to reconceive Yugoslavism. The aim of the paper is to present and contextualize their deliberations on Yugoslavism as a subversive strategy and a value alternative to the dominant cultural model in Croatia and the other countries of the former Yugoslavia.
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This paper analyzes the novel Three Journeys (Izvanbrodski dnevnik) by Slobodan Novak, in terms of its narrative structure and literary devices that are being used to disfigure the speech produced by centres of power in both everyday and official communication. As opposed to political allegory, to which the novel has been linked so far, it is argued that a complex narrative structure and stylistically carefully crafted storytelling point to self-referentiality of the novel. The story of Magistar is framed by Magistar’s writing of manipulative techniques used by other characters against him. Writing is a successful resistance practice to manipulation of perception because it exposes the unspoken assumptions of the latter, as well as it reveals mechanisms of emotional abuse. The novel is read as a place of freedom from a one-sided interpretation referencing the political state in former Yugoslavia, demonstrating by its structure that freedom in literature is in fact entitlement of literature to be free of any type of instrumentalization.
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Since the 1980s, especially with the HBO rise, there has been a development of different type of TV series that are designated as the quality TV series in order to be distinguished from the regular TV series. The most important conditions for the creation of the quality TV series are explained, followed by a short resume of the development of Croatian TV series. Furthermore, the paper analyses poetics and politcs of the series The Paper (Novine) and The Success (Uspjeh), with a special attention given to a representation of (peripheral) space. In conclusion, Novine and Uspjeh are recognised as the quality TV. This term is problematized through a perspective of series’ double effect – as both economic and cultural products, with a focus on importance of global interpretive community of contemporary cultural omnivores. Making their own choices, they establish their own cultural and symbolic capital and at the same time construct global TV series canon as well as partially deconstruct dichotomy of the central and the peripheral.
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The paper examines the relationship between two marginal phenomena in the Croatian literatury studies, swearing and laughter. Swearing is a speech genre determined by the obscene and vulgar expressions associated with sex organs or anal bodily area contextualized in the so-called negative values of contemporary culture. On the other hand, laughter is the main point of the comedy that is lower positioned and very often neglected in the hierarchy of genres. However, swearing in Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism is an affirmative and positive phenomenon that has contributed to the creation of a free carnival atmosphere and other, material bodily, ridiculous aspect of the world. For a long time Croatian comedies of the second half of the 17th century (smješnice) were on the verge of literary history studies. In this paper we are primarily interested in smješnice because they belong to the carnival type of ceremonial-representational forms of the culture of folk humor, with swearing as its integral part. The study analyses swearing in smješnice considering the type (swear words referring to sex and sexuality, insult), the direction of swearing (speaker, listener, third person, inanimate matter, animals) and the domain from which metaphorically-insulting words are taken (body parts, animals, ethnic groups, confessions, inanimate matter, human qualities…). Thus, different types of swear words provide an insight into the literary representation of everyday life in premodern Dubrovnik.
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Homosexuality and gender identity issues, although lately often thematized, are still marginalized in Croatian society. Nonetheless, these topics occur as key concepts within which dramatic conflicts and characters are evolving. The two plays which will be analyzed were awarded with Marin Držić award for the best drama text and were staged in two Croatian theaters – ZKM and Kerempuh. The interpersonal relationships within one family and people close to the family members are on display in Tomislav Zajec’s play Ono što nedostaje. The main focus is on the sixteen-year-old David, who, appart from finding a way to communicate with his parents, has to struggle with his sexuality and the desire to be accepted and loved. In terms of speech and physical act his inner struggle is the greatest dramatic conflict and resolution at the same time, so his homosexuality is not in the focus of the play. The second play Ja od jutra nisam stao by Una Vizek addresses the issue of gender identity in today’s society. The author of the play attributes female characteristics to men by taking into account social prejudices and expectations. Each character is indicated with a number and their replica exchange is the usual form of a female chatter. The aim of this research is to show which strategies are used by authors to show the marginalization of the mentioned social groups, how characters are starting a conversation or losing the right to speak but also how they are entering into a dramatic conflict.
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In this paper we will analyze the personal choice of individuals, who chose peripheral life on the island which is their prison and their freedom at the same time. Though eager to do so, the protagonists of the novel, Mali and Draga, do not escape from the island. They are essentially prisoners of their own choice, from which they apparently try to escape, not escaping only from responsibilities and obligations that tie them to the island, that is, to nurturing a handicapped old women Madonna. In self-deprivation and oppression satisfying Madonna’s wishes, Mali voluntarily fulfills her desires, aware of the nonsense in which he dives, conscious of alienation, which he cannot resist. Although, at one point, Mali will pronounce all of his own disappointment, the reader will not accept it as the main hero’s awareness about the failure of life but she/he will rather “involve” in a postmodernist way in author’s thinking and his attitude towards the main character. The essence of the psychological lies not in the fact that the writer played with the possibility of rejecting the protagonist, but, on the contrary, enabled him to choose his path, which led him to the island, on which he remains. The bareness of life was reduced by the literary process to the final outcome of the earthly existence. Without coercion or request, just by rough realistic method, the writer points to the masculinity of the main character, who is firm, does not give up on his ideals, but at the same time remains a prisoner of his habits. With the abundance of biblical motifs and symbols, Slobodan Novak created the hero of the novel who grows out of the narrative events and who is not uniform, but in the given situations he changes, resisting, retreating or adjusting. In the atmosphere of the stagnant island an ironic and scathing prose was made, whose main protagonists accepted peripherality as a habit.
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The paper presents the motives of cultural memory which were recorded in the oral epic poems and in the tradition in Dalmatia (the Neretva Valley and Boka kotorska). The territory of Dalmatia bordered with the Ottoman Empire at the time of the Croatian-Ottoman wars, thus the oral literature of this area produced oral epic poem as a reflection of forced war and fateful contacts. Living on the frontier of Christianity and Islam has brought up a special frontier mentality which can be traced in modernity, not only through the preservation of the heritage festivities, but also through collective memory which defines the importance of the survival of everything that is geologically and culturally on margin with the threatening “other”.
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Schopenhauer’s concept of the will-to-life was transformed by one of his main disciples, Philipp Mainländer, in his Philosophy of Redemption (1876) into the will-to-death, preceding Freud’s investigations regarding the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). The post-Schopenhauerian conception that non-being is preferable to being anticipates Cioran’s discussion of suicide from A Short History of Decay (1949) and his vision of the “catastrophe” of birth from The Trouble with Being Born (1973). If, from a Nietzschean perspective, Cioran’s obsession with death is a symptom of passive nihilism, from an extreme-contemporary perspective, his pessimistic thanatophilia may resonate with our anxious crepuscular mentality, prefiguring contemporary Antinatalism.
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In this chapter I will discuss the role that Mircea Eliade had, as an exponent of the generation, in the interwar Romanian culture in general and the humanist thinking in particular, under two challenges, the historical and the political. Between the two tendencies crystallized in the Romanian interwar period, philosophical universalism and autochthonism, Mircea Eliade intuits that, after the achievement of the national unity on December 1, 1918, the Romanian culture must assume a new direction. Between the first tendency, which understood that the specificity of modernity lies in the universality of truth beyond the national specificity, and the second interested in deciphering the "Romanian vein" in the cultural and philosophical capitalization of ethnicity, Eliade projects the destiny of national culture in the universal dimension, considering that Romania's destiny must be a cultural one, and our cultural modernity should by represented by the "universal man". Eliade's project, perhaps, was doomed to failure or had a partial and unfinished character, and modernity understood as cultural universalization was only the awareness of a trend that, under the "terror of history", did not materialize. But he became a personal project that Mircea Eliade assumed through the hermeneutics of the world's religions and the understanding of homo religiosus and "total man".
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The main objective of this chapter is to present and discuss a possible solution to food waste as a problem occurring in traditional food supply chains, on the one hand, due to food overproduction, and on the other, poverty as a result of economic and pandemic crisis in Europe. The structure of the chapter covers two areas: 1. Food waste as a problem in food supply chains. 2. Reduction of poverty by implementing social supermarkets as new players in the food supply chain.
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Most of empirical literature on participation in and choice of recycling at the household level has been focused on factors determining the direct cost for households engaging in recycling efforts (Czajkowski, Kądziela, & Hanley 2012; Huhtala, 2010, Jenkins, Martinez, Palmer, & Podolsky,2003). Researchers noticed mixed findings in the literature on the significance of waste collection fees for recycling efforts. There is also a question as whether household recycling efforts represent a social cost, which should be taken into account in cost-benefit analyses of alternative waste treatment systems. Some argue that it should not be calculated, since recycling efforts are, to a large extent, voluntary. But on the other hand, households devote time to segregation, which is, in fact, an alternative cost (Bruvoll & Nyborg, 2002). One of the barriers of effective segregation seems to be a low level of awareness on recycling and segregation issues among households. That was also noticed in research conducted by Omran, Mahmood, Abdul Aziz and Robinson (2009). The aim of this case study is to recognise why citizens’ knowledge on waste segregation rules is not sufficient enough. Despite research results confirming rather limited consumer skills related to the subject, efficient methods to make people increase their awareness of what correct selective waste collection is, seem to remain still undiscovered. The students’ task is both to identify why mistakes in waste segregation are made, as well as to propose ways of helping citizens avoid them.
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The substance of the secularization theory, as formulated by most sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s, presupposed that modernity would implicitly lead to the decline of religion in society, ultimately to its elimination. Secularization, as a separation of the sacred-profane spheres, was the direct result of modernization. Today's reality contradicts this religious skepticism.
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After 1990, the Romanian political philosophy freed from the compulsory official Marxist dogma had to choose between a range of inadequate options from the viewpoint of current reality: reconnecting with the interwar tradition but in a different historical context; replaying the cold war ideological clash this time from the anti-Marxist perspective, that seemed redundant given the political and economic failure of Marxism or embracing the western post modern discourse, that didn’t reflect in any way the current Romanian political and social realities. Faced with these alternatives it was necessary to regain a philosophical experience of the transition from modernity to post-modernity that will enable the adequate approach to the realities of the transition from communism to post-modern capitalism. Given this context, from a certain philosophical perspective, the study of Rawls from A theory of Justice to Political Liberalism provided a unique opportunity to escape tradition without canceling it, to overcome the socialist-capitalist dichotomy and to connect to contemporary philosophical debates without losing the local perspective.
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In an attempt to capture the beginnings of modernity in Mircea Florian's philosophy (and, implicitly, in Romanian philosophy in the twentieth century) we start from the philosophy of recessiveness developed by the Romanian thinker and discuss, for a start, the relationship between philosophy and nation, on the one hand , and the relationship between Romanian philosophy and universal philosophy, on the other hand. In both cases, the recessive ratio indicates a duality. Philosophy means infinity, generality, totality, and the nation expresses the essence, the real, the individual. The dominant term is philosophy, and the nation is recessive. Mircea Florian accentuated the state of Romanian philosophy through a series of rules of philosophical conduct, thus affirming its autonomy from other fields of spirit and recognizing its existence in a national context.
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Since his work of youth (On the Inner Dialogue) Mihai Şora proposes the act of dialogue as an essential, self-producing state of the human being. Dialogue involves equality in dignity and alterity and the discovery of alterity as a revelation of the world as a structure of potentialities or openings of the me-you type, characterized by reciprocity. The me-you dialogue and the inner dialogue, the communion or the generalized dialogue, are at the same time an ethical commitment of the partners practicing openness and reciprocity, the foundations for freedom and for the awareness of our position in relation to the world. Dialogue produces the occupation of the inner space of the being as voice of the being and at the same time assuming of the outer space as discursiveness, as permanence of acts of being and acting together. Communion as an emotion thus edifies not only the subject participating in the dialogue but also a new entity, the communion itself, an affective perhaps agapic composition. Starting from here, we aim to explore the philosophy of dialogue of Mihai Şora as a theoretical background for a structuring the methodology of a dialogical counselling or philosophical practice aimed at elucidating and relating the subject to the outside world as an autonomous act of the self that is exercised in communion as co-author and giver of meaning.
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