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Though contemporary sociology treats the phenomenon of space extremely seriously, it appears surprising that hardly any room is devoted to the discussion of representations of space, i.e. to maps. The article attempts to fill this gap through an analysis of the application of the idea of a “mental map” to a comparative cultural study. Adopting Kevin Lynch’s largely pragmatic notion of a mental map to a theoretically oriented sociological project, the author explores the relations between the concepts of history, cultural values and memory. The discussion is focused on the ways of construing mental landscape by the exiled members of the Jewish shtetls and similarly dispossessed inhabitants of the Mazury region in Poland. The demonstrated differences present in those reconstructions are, according to the author, an excellent reflection of significant diversity in cultural perception and values, and an indication that an analysis of this kind constitutes an original and productive element in the methodology of modern sociology and historical studies.
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The starting point of the study is the conflict between classical (academic) and alternative canon. Some prominent texts of speculative fiction can notably stage this conflict (as a possible textual strategy) by confronting us with the experience that mainstream literature and popular registers are inseparable. The reading of these texts can prove that the aesthetical canon is not equivalent to cultural elitism. In contemporary literature, some works of speculative fiction – works of science fiction and fantasy in particular – support this idea. The study – by reading David Gemmell’ s “Troy Series” and Dan Simmons’ s “Hyperion Cantos” – exemplifies the fact that the principle of innovation does not necessarily destruct the existing canon but integrates itself into the canon while rearranging it. The works of Gemmell and Simmons employ such poetical and rhetorical techniques that are able to modify the system of expectations created by the evoked genres (mythological fantasy and new space opera) and also lead us to reconsider the classical literary canon. They both indicate that an artificially created cultural hierarchy can be set in motion by rereading works of popular literature.
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Systems theory offers the opportunity to model communication as a principle of the self-organization of social systems. It is a tool for observing the mechanisms and principles of the construction of social reality made visible in acts of communication. Until the 1980s, systematic study of the canon was, in the German environment, inhibited by a traditional understanding of the canon, according to which the canon contained the best works. Since the overcoming of this idea, the study of the canon has become more differentiated as part of the study of literature evaluation. In the literary scholarship of German-speaking countries in the 1980s, the research of the mechanisms and components of the literary canon was becoming increasingly impotent; there is research about the historical background of its construction and its position in contemporary society. A certain consensus already exists, e.g., in the rejection of opinions that explain the construction of the canon through the aesthetic qualities of particular artistic works, as practised by Harold Bloom. On the contrary, the thinking about the canon converges in the idea that the canon reflects social conditions, group interests, etc. There are several varieties of social background-based canon formation (postcolonial, gender, social, discourse analytical…); however, it is the textual aspects, and the aesthetic qualities of texts, that are undervalued as possible elements in the process of canonization, which is also typical for system-theoretical literary study in general, which accompanies and strongly influences canon research in Germany. My reflections will develop primarily in the context of the systems theory developed by Niklas Luhmann and its application on the study of literature as an autopoietic system.
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