engleski

Imagology Today: Achievements, Challenges, Perspectives / Imagologie heute: Ergebnisse, Herausforderungen, Perspektiven

The Book of Proceedings of the conference "Imagology Today: Achievements, Challenges, Perspectives" (Zagreb, 2-4 September 2009) comprises 23 contributions, which have not been classified into any special categories, but their order has nevertheless a narrative/thematic logic. It opens with texts by two founders of the discipline: Hugo Dyserinck, founder of the Aachen school of comparative literature and imagology, and the leading French imagologist Daniel Henri Pageaux. In their papers, they both restate the mission and methodology of imagology from their point of view, whereby Dyserinck focuses on dismissing one of the old objections – that imagology is merely disguised ethnopsychology (or even Völkerpsychologie!), which is a research discipline that is not entirely immune to national essentialism. The special value of this concise paper is the critical elaboration of the author’s relation towards the Institut Havrais de Psychologie de Peuples et de Sociologie Économique and its publication Revue de Psychologie des Peuples that lent imagology its name. Pageaux once again summarised his views regarding the topic of research and methodology of imagology and responded to criticism (a too broad a field of research, an overly structuralist approach, simplified classification of relations towards other cultures, conceptual deficit compared to post-colonial studies). The Paris professor of comparative literature here reasserted his confidence in structuralism, methods of cultural anthropology and Annales School, in turn pointing out the close relatedness of imagology and the history of ideas. These papers are followed by texts by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen as editors of the most frequently cited book on imagology in this volume, the handbook Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters – A Critical Survey (Amsterdam, New York, 2007). Among all the conference papers in these proceedings, Beller’s is probably the most ambitious attempt to improve imagological methodology. This comparatist of German origin and retired professor of the University of Bergamo summarised – on the basis of many examples from (mostly German) literature, literary criticism and everyday experience – three modalities of comparison that lie at the base of stereotypical images and three factors of their variability. Joep Leerssen, professor of Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam and one of the most acknowledged and productive contemporary imagologists, has lately been successfully combining imagology with nationalism studies. In his article, utilising the example of the Walloon Movement as a case study, he examines a special variant of nationalism – "residual-reactive nationalism", the most famous manifestation of which is unionism in Ulster, and that can be identified in many other forms in East-Central and South-Eastern Europe. A series of papers in which the general problems of the imagological approach exceed or are at least equal to the presentation of research of the imagotype material follows hereinafter. Hungarian comparatist, István Fried, using the novel The Banners (Zastave) by M. Krleža as an example, seeks to confirm the theses about the analytical usefulness of imagotype binarism own/other and about the meaning of aesthetic (not only ideological) phenomena in shaping images. The idea of a double research potential of imagology, with many examples from the European literary Renaissance, is also elaborated by Paolo Proietti – the literary image can be approached from a cultural, interdisciplinary interest for its relatedness to the time in history in which it originated, or from a literary interest for its determinedness by poetic norms. Pavle Sekeruš discusses the problem of an imagological approach to policies of (national) identity, with special reference to the French and Balkan areas, starting from classic modernist nation-building to contemporary consciously developed regulation strategies of the cultural community within the national framework. The papers by the two conference organisers also focus on the problem of an imagological approach. The article by Zrinka Blažević is actually the only one in this collection of conference papers that remains in the domain of theoretical discourse – this historian of the University of Zagreb contemplates the possibility of constituting a historical imagology, which she labels as transdisciplinary and translational research practice, incorporating into the suggested global research programme very different contemporary paradigms of theory and research. Davor Dukić, on the other hand, explores the reasons and consequences of imagology’s lack of interest for problems relating to the historic credibility of its own subject area – images. The contribution by Goran Krnić is also concerned with the relationship between imagology and history. A colleague of the historian Hans Henning Hahn from the University of Oldenburg, Krnić answers the question: can imagology profit from a historic approach to stereotypes? Stereotypes are also the focus of Clemens Ruthner’s paper. Ruthner, an Austrian scholar in German studies from Trinity College Dublin, starts with a very instructive critical overview of the history of imagology, along with a contrastive comparison of the comprehension of stereotypes from W. Lippmann to H. Bhabha, and rounds up by showing different concepts of stereotype creation in a case study of a 19th century Austrian novel (F. Kürnberger, Der Amerikamüde). Since this paper can also prove useful to scholars less versed in imagology and associate disciplines, the editor allowed for its somewhat greater length. The third in the group of papers dealing with the imagological concept of stereotypes is a contribution by the Viennese comparatist Wolfgang Müller-Funk. With a relational/intercultural (not a cognitive/identitarian) understanding of stereotypes as the starting point, he embarks on an analysis of an intriguing subject – stereotypes about America in the novel by F. Kafka Der Verschollene (Amerika). In his implicit criticism of the traditional imagological favouring of analyses of national identity representations, Slobodan Vladušić confronts the imagological approach, using examples from Serbian travelogues, with an untypical research topic – the cosmopolitan emergence of a global, multicultural city as the embodiment of the identitarian concept of worldliness. Using as examples the analyses of images of Slovenia in literary works by two Croatian authors, one French and one Austrian author, Tone Smolej questions the value differences and structural differences in the interpretation of the same imagotype motifs in the observing and observed (Slovene) culture. In investigating the pragmatics of images, children’s and youth literature holds a special place. Gina Weinkauff, head of the most extensive research project on the imagotype/intercultural potential of German children’s and youth literature, discusses some theoretical aspects of approaching this corpus (similarities with the poetics of oral literature ; differentiation of the close and distant other ; importance of poetic changes etc.). The paper by Celeste Ribeiro de Sousa is the only one that stands apart from the “Eurocentrism” that dominates in the proceedings – a scholar in German studies from the University of São Paulo and a leading figure of Brazilian imagology gives a short historic overview of three aspects of national imagology: hetero-images and self-images about Brazil and Brazilian imagological criticism. Since its very beginnings, imagological research has primarily focused on fictional literature, while film, nonfiction and visual arts, in spite of the cultural turn, have been considerably less in the focus of attention of imagologists. Three contributions to these proceedings, in the form of three imagological case studies (one of a historical figure, one of a historic event, and one of a hetero-image), are especially dedicated to the research of visual materials. The art historian Heinke Fabritius analyses the relationship between the painting and its accompanying inscriptions on three portraits of the great Turkish Vizier Kara Mustafa from the late 17th century. Spanish Romanicist and imagologist José Manuel López de Abiada examines the propaganda strategies of the confronted sides and – through the analysis of fiction, film, and photography – the imagological aspects of the presentation of the Spanish Civil War in the media. In his attempt to prove that the Soviet prosecution of Germans in early 1940s had its deeper roots in the intellectual history of Russia, Joshua Walker analyses the Russian images of Germans in literary criticism, on film and in painting as well as its traces in the 1941 deportation ukaze itself. Among the articles in which the topic of research prevails over the problematisation of theoretical and methodological ideas are three imagological analyses of more recent/more contemporary literary texts. Davor Beganović explores national auto- and heterostereotypes in three more recent novels by Bosnian authors of Serbian origin who write about the life in Sarajevo during the war in the 1990s. Below layers of political correctness and possible ironisation of national stereotypes, his analysis nevertheless unveils a deep national one-sidedness in all three analysed novels. Małgorzata Świderska analyses images of England and the South Slavic area in the novel Die Wasserfälle von Slunj (1963) by the Austrian writer Heimit von Doderer, applying precise imagological terminology and the hermeneutic dichotomies of Paul Ricœur (ideology/utopia) and Jean-Marc Moura (alter/alius). Jasmina Mojsieva-Gusheva reconstructs the image of the Russian immigrant in three Macedonian novels published after 2000, whose authors are also of Russian origin. In his frequently quoted early “manifesto” (Arcadia, 1, 1966, 2: 107-120), Hugo Dyserinck advocated the research of the imagological potential of literary historiography and criticism. This goal has been met by the last paper in this volume – Dyserinck’s student Horst Schmidt points to the construction of the French and German national character in the works of German Romanicist Eduard Wechssler. Parallel advancement of theoretical and methodological concepts and the expansion of the research field occur naturally in the development of every theory and research paradigm in the humanities, consequently also in imagology. Papers in this volume are evidence thereof. Imagology – this dominantly European and less assertive older sister of post-colonial studies – has neither a journal of its own nor an international association or uninterrupted series of international conferences. However, in spite of the institutional deficit and upsurges in several regions of the global scientific landscape, it has stubbornly endured since the early 1980s. Moreover, one has the impression that lately its shares have soared in the markets of research ideas in Central and Southeast Europe. Considering the list of contributors and topics, this is to some extent confirmed by this Book of Proceedings that aimed at encompassing the whole of imagology – its history, current research interests, and plans and wishes for the future.

imagology; stereotype; image; imagery; identity

U knjizu su objavljeni radovi na njemačkom, engleskim i francuskom jeziku.