Pesnikova torba

D, Bucharest Contributing Authors: Nina Urukalo PR Manager: Ljudmila Pendelj Technical Editor: Pavle Halupa Editorial Photographers: The Institute for culture of Vojvodina, De Man, Pol Even with- the late twentieth century something went wrong with out formulating a conclusion resulting from carefully literature and its cultural status: Perhaps more porary culture, film and the Internet, or all of the above; reading is done at the beginning of the twentieth-first your daily newspaper can go for weeks on end diligently century in New York on any one day, than in a whole reporting everything about reality show personalities of year a hundred years ago.

The public sphere the world over advancement: But technology alone ter.

• Encyclopedia of Stock Car Racing [2 volumes]!
• .
• .
• University Physics Volume 1 (WCB Physics).
• The Kraken?
• Your Emotional Hamster Wheel and How to Get Off It!

And to add insult to the injury, some hotels have be- could not have changed the nature of reading: Yet, one cannot but notice that never read quickly and superficially many books only once. More than two place in the nineteenth century, was the book market. In conjunction with compulsory primary edu- bile phone, or to be listened as audio-book. In reality, even have had an opportunity to read - Fifty Shades of Grey. The literary market in the nineteenth readers who know how to read carefully and critically century was experienced as a precondition for artistic is declining even among academics — this complaint is autonomy, and made possible every oppositional and another standing items at academic gatherings, and not critical stance.

Of course there was a price to be paid without reason; and among those two hundred thou- for this autonomy: This become conformist instead of critical and challenging was neither a fully-fledged autonomy nor a straightfor- in its moral, political and aesthetic dimensions. If lit- ward heteronomy: This historical construc- of artistic production in socialist societies.

Without this tion assumes that the Modernist literature at its peak historical deviation, one could easily construct a tele- managed to occupy the position of perfect independ- ological narrative in which technology, political devel- ence and autonomy with regard to moral, political and opments and economic necessities all conspire towards aesthetic conventions as well as the market. The Modernization of Rural politically and aesthetically constrained by the market.

France , London: In a word, a triumph of the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey. Karaoke Culture, Rochester, NY: Open Letter, , pp. There were authors the market pressure? The usual and hasty answer to who were able to achieve substantial market success, this question is: This rificing all morally, politically and aesthetically subver- is inaccurate and cannot be corroborated by evidence. The majority, however, was able to ignore Although the authorities certainly welcomed all vol- the market: The real reason belongs to the sphere of and could offer writers a decent fee even for work which what is unthinkable and unmentionable in the present sold poorly — all these created conditions which encour- political climate: Instead of imag- that profit if not the ultimate measure of everything.

This system be- The social patronage was not conditional upon explicit lieved that even the smallest town should have a sub- support for the authorities; everybody was entitled to sidized theatre and an art gallery, and built them eve- it, providing they did not radically and explicitly ques- rywhere: This was, of course, politically subversive. How- could find their rightful place. Cynics would immedi- ever, as the novel refrained from explicitly challenging ately note that this might be one of the reasons for its the authorities and calling for their overthrow, the au- failure.

Kantor continued to design for the of an artist, painter cum theater director cum perfor- stage on a regular basis throughout the s, primarily mance, happening director which have given him the working on abstract sets. At any rate, the mental and the emotional scope from the real theatrical praxis that these artists executed of the most important theater and film directors of our in their own time, but these notions also come from times have consisted in viewing their representational their respective real life experiences where their living world as the series of consecutive paintings, that is, the existence was reduced to zero.

As his childhood developed at the crossroads of them and explain in any given manner. Under the steady eye of Karol Frycz he formed his ance in the second part of the 20th century, painful sto- interest for the Russian theater of Meyerhold but also for ries of nomadic moves or of an exile, the internal one the German Bauhaus school, and for Erwin Piscator who or the physical, external one. The constraint of such spoke of the necessity for the permanent revolution in the history is also often explained by the rigor, discipline domain of art. And I know that the expressionism Ka, which is , according to the archaic, ancient world a pushed to the extreme — is the dead-end in art.

And as much as Kantor a minimalist fragment, but later connected by the fine was under the influence of Gombrowicz and his theater of line of grotesque humor into an entity as is the case the absurd throughout his life, by the end of it his thoughts with the Dead Class. In the Dead Class, Kantor fact the objects predestined to relate to one another in conducts the steady but perhaps hidden dialogue with a phenomenological manner. Here he comes close to Schulz, the author of Tractatus on Mannequins, who was another giant of the postmodern theater, the Ameri- his Virgil, thus his guide in the degraded reality of the junk can director Richard Foreman who had a similar ap- world and discarded objects not only in this play but also proach to his theater sets and his actors in his Onto- in Waterhen the theme of the eternal voyage.

History- a blind object leads yet another blind thing.

But they are not capable of telling astory, or the of grey, black and white parade in their splendor. Such an object ironically threatens human so- and although they are sparse and not numerous on ciety and mankind and is prevented from any action by stage, they are disturbing. He does not believe in il- the apparatchik such as professor Green. Here, like in lusion and he draws the spectator in right away: The quintessence of the Surrealism sure that by the end of the show, his dream becomes a is extreme realism or, as Djordje Kostic, the founder nightmare.

By applying such evening and be served there the same, tasty meal: Kan- a structural, Surrealist shortcut into his performance, tor invites his audience to join his stage, but unlike the Kantor reduces both scenic space and the temporal du- Living Theater also the adepts of Piscator he does not ration of his assemblage or a happening or performance. Kantor invents the semantic game and sets it on tion — by insisting on the absence of life thus the no- the stage resembling a chess-field where he invites you tion of his Theater of Death he really points out at the for a rollercoaster ride each slope is a different chapter presence of the living elsewhere.

With duced for its diminutive citizens. Psycho- the never-to-arrive communist promise — an eternal analysis has long noted the implicit historicity of de- present rich in possibility and feeling was depicted and sire, its dependence on a narrative sequence that offers brought into being in popular musicals and animated hope, however unrealized, of filling the constitutive films, providing a revitalizing time and space where lack in the subject.

Broadly disseminated sound activated desire not through a reestablishment of lin- 1 Stagnation in the Brezhnev years was not merely economic but also rhetorical and ideological: Bruce Fink , Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive , It is the act of adults tion of the New Man, while the English Alice, as every looking back. I propose that the death of the Soviet Union, yesterday things went on just as usual. But when aboveground episte- Steyngart Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume I, , When an object is Looking Glass: Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning , The leading nowhere and the Mad Tea Party in stalled time race has no rules, cause, or final goal.

Participants begin might have resonated for Soviet audiences in , where they wish, run chaotically in all directions, and exquisitely connoting frustration with ever-breaking everyone wins. Motion is an end in itself. An- an English experience and Soviet everyday life in the drews and Asif A. Space Exploration and s. Needless to say, late socialism had not given rise Soviet Culture , ; Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, to a bourgeoisie facing a threat to its power in the fields ; Donald J.

Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: But the Brezh- chak draws on theorists J. Nonsense and filling pages with long phrases lifted from past documents. A point underexplored by Yurchak but on the Occasion of the th Anniversary of the Birth of Charles Lutwidge particularly important for me is that a performative shift not only enabled Dodgson , Brezhnev-era stagnation but also staged it repeatedly. Stagnant authori- 11 Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Vysotskii must have relished setting to The formulation of Alisa as transitional space, I music scenes like this one, given the vivid depictions hope to show, enabled an exploration of especially dif- of the Soviet shadow economy, drunken attempts to ficult, emotionally knotted themes in late socialism, cut corners, and more serious graft and corruption in and explains the second, related feature unique to Vy- many of his other compositions.

Nevertheless, one cannot fail ber of important places. For the rest of this section I to notice the discrepancy between the cheerfully self- would like to discuss two striking features that distin- parodying libretto and the weighty emotional burden guish the late-Soviet version from the original.

Bor- Vysotskii has placed on it through the songs. Finally, Vysotskii himself sings a jectivity — the recognition of oneself and others as sub- number of the songs, impersonating several characters jects with distinct internal worlds.

In doing so he simultaneously acts as an internal voice constructing an alternate narrative; a 18 D. He conceived analytic treatment as concurrently, experiencing internality and externality a holding environment, a place of trust and safety that free of strain and without challenge. The transitional serves a reparative and enlivening function for those object has materiality and is acknowledged by the in- who were deprived of proper maternal care.

Transitional phenomena produce all creative — point to and hold together a series of paradoxes, re- impulses and subjectivity itself. It is the originary field versals, and metonymic progressions the heroine faces. At a later stage, through gradual failures of half-sung, half-spoken monologue by the narrator, we maternal adaptation, weaning is achieved. Despite her girlish altitu- spondence between external reality and its own capac- dinous voice and references to scenes of play, we intuit ity to create can it make creative use of the world. The Collected Papers of H. Guntrip , Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus, eds.

Are we, then, to read Wonderland as a discursive I get lots of competing advice: Please take Alisa with you! A watch, and a real one! Goodness, how uncivi- And what is that experience? She is trapped in, forbid- lized! And English adults… well, and dulling of imagination that she must rely on an- they always arrive early and immediately become very other, a kind wayfaring Sir, presumably foreign, to take very angry that they are being made to wait.

And when her away to a place she cannot picture, in order to do the person for whom they waited arrives on time they and see things she cannot conceive. In the penultimate promptly challenge him to a duel. She wants to tance as well, heightening the feeling of simultaneous pulsate with dynamic aliveness, promiscuously travers- externality and internality, home and abroad. As she plum- in the presence and under the gaze of the Other. When Alisa inquires about the depth of inside her? Anxious foreboding consumes her, menacing vio- space and time: Now girls stand on But inexplicably, having descended in haste, their heads and even dare to ask what country this is.

This sense to some de- chest register: Hey, au- gree arises from extramusical associations — the expe- thorities!!! What visitor to Moscow, — that give the impression of emphatically regular and after all, has not unwittingly offended a low-level offi- directional motion, as the listener easily guesses the cial, guard, or administrator, and suffered her chilling next bar of music.

If the Antipodes are anti-everything, reproach? One requires only a rudimentary knowledge they are unaware of it: Another march, decidedly more percussive and slavish and lemming-like in their groupthink; they are militaristic, accompanies the processional entrance pure performance, unattached to any meaningful ref- of the Court really a deck of playing cards near the erent. It is the centerpiece of a su- should be understood in all its absurdist sarcasm, since premely ironic scene: Alisa, after much vexation, has the former is a bumbling idiot and the latter acts solely finally realized her most ardent desire in Wonderland on caprice.

The orchestration also has a humorous ef- and gained entry into the Garden.

1. I AM?
2. Climate of the Southeast United States: Variability, Change, Impacts, and Vulnerability (NCA Regional Input Reports)?
3. Histoire des sciences de lhomme et de la criminologie (Sciences criminelles) (French Edition)?
4. Dragan Tomić (Author of Uvoštena mama).
5. Le ragioni dellinconscio (Italian Edition).
6. Divine Deliverance from the Hands of Gunmen.

Instead of an idyll, fect: These instruments produce thin and of Hearts whose restrained low-pitched commands delicate metallic sounds evocative of toy soldiers and sound more like those of a Soviet party official than a other objects of the nursery. Victorian hysteric and an inert King — a thoroughly But there is also a haunting seriousness here, confused and ineffectual father, or failed master signifi- and it emanates from the undeniable impression er.

In the Garden, like everywhere else in Wonderland, that the Soviet Union is the target of the satire. The symbolic meaning to otherwise cartoonish, free-floating fig- order has so disintegrated that there ceases to be a divi- ures like the King and Queen. Geese and hoarse baritone, enunciating each word with delib- turtles are being used for mallets and balls in a game erate pace and his usual mixture of passion, irony, of royal croquet.

The turtles crawl away and the geese and bitterness, immediately communicates a long bend their necks, making playing by the rules impos- chain of distinctly Soviet associations informed by sible. In short, the Law is dead, or never existed. And his many similar-sounding outlaw and war-themed yet the marching guards swear to obey it in the person songs. It is a voyage into feel- You are given that right: The garden scene, therefore, achieves two effects.

To fall on their knees — never a problem! On the one hand, it renders a late-socialist space with a The King answers for everything, And if not the King, well then — the Queen!

The music, full of feeling, conveys a sense of binds meaning. His well-known personality occupies reaching and aspiring, while the inane lyrics and minor an exceptional position with respect to the symbolic key betray it, imparting melancholy and loss: It is also at this moment that Alisa begins to And on this occasion I wonder: So much confusion and She seems destined to fail repeatedly, incurring further disorder!

Finally I am in a place where I know every- losses, but Dodo immediately shifts the mood by reveal- thing and everyone knows me. He advises and hints, allowing Alisa to tolerate the frame. She asks Dodo if he laid them down especially experience can emerge. To further illustrate transition- for her, knowing she would fall and ensuring a soft al phenomena in Wonderland, I would like to return landing.

Alisa finds herself again in a dark and I am narrating it to you. Luckily, Dodo is 29 I follow Yurchak here, who argues: For this reason, sponse to her queries. Is it Everyone waited for noon, but it never arrived, — Charles Dodgson as Dodo, or the smile of the Cheshire Look what sort of time is upon us — Cat, who accompanies Alisa on several later adventures?

Or is Dodo, rather, the maternal figure who presents ob- And … happy people watched the clock jects? Or an analyst type impersonating the good-enough frightened. Winnicott observed that the transitional object Cowards howled is fated to be decathected and abandoned; not because it their laments. It is not forgotten and it is not mourned. It loses their big mouths, meaning, and this is because the transitional phenomena The lazy have become diffused … over the whole cultural field.

Upcoming Events

Grease the wheels of Time — Alisa, we recall, outgrows the story, becoming estranged not for the sake of reward, from and breaking through its maddening circularity. This is not a nostalgic song, however: Nor is it an ode to chronology, scene. Rath- meditation on the predicament of stagnation. It begins er, it seems more a lament on the difficulty of coping slowly and repetitively, with eight Gs, all eighth notes: It shares their tonality Clamorers rushed Time, and abounds in melodic echoes.

This leitmotivic quality, urging. To picture what can happen. What if a gap appears and a leap is necessary, 31 Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 7. Aria [or] … song tends to function as a static Good and evil exist. Each of these [kinds of] times Only here they live on different shores. Aria, how- ever, can stop action. Like Alisa, the Stagnation-era performance of childhood. Alisa experiences only points from which to look at, and be in, a broken so- exasperation there and yearns to reestablish an episte- ciety in order to rediscover and envisage herself anew.

This of course is true, Cheburashka and Queer Time but it is not Wonderland that provides comfort, proph- The Cheburashka four-part series, probably the most ecy, and enchantment. The utopian impulse originates beloved cartoon produced in the late-Soviet period, also in a more quotidian, relational realm — in the bonds offered audiences much in the way of queerness. Transpositions of a Russian Theme In musical theater, as in opera, the choice be- , An International tween song and speech is often a choice between two Literary Quarterly Winter , Krokodil Gena , Cheburashka , Shapokliak , and Cheburashka idet v shkolu For a discussion of the technical and artistic aspects of Cheburashka Quarterly 40, no.

The Then and There of Queer Futurity In the last episode, Cheburashka articulations of queer resistance to disciplinary, normal- idet v shkolu Cheburashka Goes to School, he izing mechanisms of power. From the start, Cheburashka even sends Cheburashka a telegram. But because Gena embodies, effects, and performs a radical unknowability. Sitting in a zoo enclosure, his tity markers and promptly is taken to the zoo. Upon meeting the fit. Cheburashka, too, and battle a polluting factory manager. Witnessing fails to solve the riddle of his own identity.

But nothing of the kind happens. Cheburashka bedded and poignantly expressed in the music, espe- is quite subjectivized and self-possessed, unfazed by his cially the two best-known and instantly classic songs biological indeterminacy: When we first meet stam describes queer time as a model of temporality Gena he is a crocodile in essence, biology, occupation, rooted in and committed to the present, compress- public and inner realms — in seamless unity with his ing time and expanding the potential of the moment.

The truck and the arrival of a blue, or goluboi helicopter — used here its lethargic driver putt-putt toward Gena, who sits on to express queerness, a shift in temporal and spatial co- a bench playing an accordion and singing a sentimen- ordinates. The helicopter transports Gena to a magical tal birthday song: I am playing my accordion And even though we mourn the past a little bit outside for all to see. Unfortunately, birthdays come only once a year. Smoothly, effortlessly the long path spreads beneath and runs straight into the horizon.



• The Pepper Pantry: Habanero: Habaneros.
• Some Girls Do;
• .
• ?
• .
• .

What if suddenly a magician arrived Everyone, everyone hopes for the best in a blue helicopter and our blue traincar rolls forward. Perhaps we hurt someone gratuitously … He would wish me happy birthday the calendar will turn that page for us. Hey, driver, speed it up! One is immediately struck by the unmistakably [refrain] doleful quality of what is supposed to be, if we believe the lines, a celebratory song. I wish it would last the whole year. The solitary Gena, basically a street musician, performs [refrain] for an audience of one — the delivery man.

Indeed, the lyrics are belied by a gaping absence of people. Not only simpleton if juxtaposed with a character from Tolstoy the magician and ice cream, but the entire song can be or Dostoevsky. But compared to his former self, say, in read as a hallucination narrated to cover over various the first episode, he is a world-weary sage, thorough- lacks: And, befitting an intelligent, he cream bars dropped from the sky is the perfect fantasy. The tive postscript and halt in the action. The lyrics of the sad contemplation evoked by artifacts of that childhood song present us with an apparent contradiction as well.

Despite possible loss and difficulty, we Its deadness and irretrievability produces a melancholic must let go of past grievances, direct our attention toward stance, as does the disillusionment with Soviet myths the future, and seek new adventures. Do it now, acceler- and their progenitors. More important, perhaps, radical ate, move along; the best is ahead. And, to and the others sit at the rear of the caboose, looking not complicate the matter further still: They seem to antici- sort of skepticism commonly elicited by over-insistence: Or, more likely, the queue grew strange a foreclosure of futurity.

Why were songs about time con- central organizing principle.

Verdery discusses how the fliction of petty miseries? Everyday Economies After Socialism , esp. Novellas and Stories, trans. It spans two works: Olia must perform these various tasks only action beneficial to the state. Since socialist regimes to rush home and cook dinner, look after her children, sought to accumulate means of production above all, and tend to her aloof spouse.

Food shortages, pronatalist policies are given out to all women in the for example, meant long stints in queues, while deficits workplace. Yet the bodies that are supposed to be pro- of fuel rendered complicated and tiring such basic ac- ducing children for the state are kept overworked, un- tivities as getting to and from work. The binding of the dernourished, and docile: Olia describes her own ema- labor force in queues was not seen as a cost to the social- ciated and exhausted body, as well as those of her fe- ist state because it accrued supplies and not profit.

Temporal organization, further- woman-mother under Brezhnev. Vez z imenom se pozneje v javnem obtoku ohranja z nizom drugih tekstov, izjav. V primeru neskladnosti se preksvetna identiteta med dvojnikom in izvirnikom omaje: Odlika literarnih besedil je ravno njihova polireferencialnost White- side , Omenil sem, da sta Ingarden in Searle trditve romanopiscev razglasila za navidezne: Aplikacija Teorija mora biti uporabna tudi v dejanskih situacijah, zato za sklep ponujam tole quasi izvedensko mnenje o primeru Pikalo.

Pikalo je poskrbel, da je dogajalno okolje zabrisano z do- slednim sistemom preimenovanj. Vzdevek Petarda ni unikat, pred Pikalovim romanom v javnem diskurzu ni bil dokumentiran, znan je bil le v krajevnih govoricah. Zastopajo avtoritete, ki se jim mladostni pripovedovalec upira. Karakterizacijo narekujeta estetika in semantika pripovedovanja: Subjekt, ki izreka negativne opise policaja Petarde, je fiktiven.

Zato imajo vse trditve o Petardi dvojen modalni okvir, uvaja jih fikcijski operator: V cenzurnih predpisih so bili zajeti tudi prepovedani idejni in literarni tokovi npr. A New History of French Literature. Literary Criticisms of Law. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Fiction and Possible Worlds. The Johns Hopkins university press. The Future of Literary Theory. Truth, Fiction, and Literature: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics.

University of Toronto press. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Camb- ridge university press. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. The Johns Hopkins UP. Today's literature cannot find its legitimacy exclusively within its own field, the sense as to its characteristics is weakening, and so is the sense of what constitutes fiction.

In public discourse, the same ethics holds for journalists as well as writers. In a court of law there is a con- frontation of two equally legitimate interests of two subjects: An acceptable legal reasoning is pre- sented by R. Posner, who states that the criminal liability of writers for slander should be minimized. There is always something fictional in reality, and vice versa; the boundaries between the two fields are pragmatic and subject to cultural and historical change.

Fiction is one of the possible worlds and is textually and ontologically homogenous. Besides fictitious characters, it contains versions of persons from extra-literary reality and intertextuality. Through the reference of names and descriptions they make or break transworld identity. This play with reality represents one of the charms, as well as the dangers, of literary discourse. Petarda is a minor character that shows up right at the climax, in which Alfred is experiencing his own climax with a French woman during his sexual initiation.

The officer masturbates while watching the scene and afterwards tries to force the woman to pay a bribe. This change in perception was triggered by articles in the local newspapers: He succeeded in having Pikalo charged with libel and causing emo- tional distress in court. Towards the end of the twentieth century, lit- erature was losing its halo of autonomy that was barely able to be maintained by the ideology conceived during Romanticism and developed mainly by liter- ary historians towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Illiterate masses lived peaceful lives without reading literary works of art long into the second half of the nineteenth century. Even recent empirical studies indicate poor reading rates of Slovenian and foreign classics as well as contemporary writers that are established among literary critics. It is true that cultural literacy training was long attached to lan- guage examples taken from belles-lettres; from the last third of the nineteenth century onwards, intellectuals were required to systematically learn about the art- ists of their national languages in school in order to accumulate cultural capital and strengthen national awareness.

Many influential politicians and businessmen actually despised belle-lettres and considered it to be merely entertainment, something for women, a mark of status, or a weapon to be used to attain ideological and political goals. The conviction, which stirred up heated public debate, was later overturned by the constitutional court. Today literature is obviously losing this special charm and is increasingly merging into public discourse crowded with print and electronic media. A writer and a journalist seem equivalent; they are bound by the same laws and the same ethics of public speech.

Literary discourse has found itself in a position in which it can no longer legitimize itself from within, from itself, through the texts of players in the literary system; for example, through structuralist theories of literariness cf. Literary discourse must also negotiate with them regarding what is true and right. In the Pikalo case, the discipline with which literary discourse grappled in order to socially legitimize its truth, order of values, and functions is law, which in turn is implemented through laws and the judiciary.

The history of official and legal restrictions on the creative imagination of writ- ers is long and has not yet been fully studied. Thus only a few historical outlines and narrative examples will have to suffice in order to retrospectively elucidate the Pikalo case. As usual, it all begins with Plato. In his Republic, Plato conceived a utopian model of the state, although he relied on de facto examples. In addition, he created this dialogue at the Academy, where young men studied philosophy before beginning careers in politics. Their texts also suffered: This activity was primarily carried out by the institution of censorship cf.

Relying on laws, regulations, and various indexes of prohibited writings, authors, and ideas, censorship monitored public speech and images, from leaflets and catalogs through maps and decorative artwork on every- day products to sophisticated treatises and poetic masterpieces. It safeguarded ta- boos, filtered representations, preserved the canon and the power of the dominant and socially cohesive discourses, and eliminated any deviant voices that could introduce heresy and disobedience into the orthodoxy.

The dangers of heresy were monitored by ecclesiastical censorship: The invention of printing ushered in preventive censorship: From the sixteenth century onwards, censorship increasingly began serving the secular authorities, especially within absolutist monarchies. Nineteenth-century Restoration regimes also devel- oped a variegated apparatus to tame the freedom of expression discovered dur- ing the Enlightenment, practically everywhere and especially in the newspapers.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, censorship had already begun to be abolished in Europe, but the twentieth-century totalitarian regimes reintroduced it and carried it to extremes. In the non-democratic regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, censorship controlled the scope and shape of what could be represented in texts, and defined the reach of any form of public communica- tion.

It operated preventively by approving or rejecting and limiting publications, and retroactively by imposing sanctions on authors and publishers or purging li- brary collections. The true roots of the dispute between literary fiction and laws that characterizes the Pikalo case only reach back to the mid-nineteenth century.

Modern law and literature have actually developed in parallel cf. Individuals that relied on the ideologeme of their autonomy in order to establish themselves in various social areas from economy to religion despite the absolutist Restoration regimes and the principles of the capitalist world system, appeared in art as subjects of imagination and aesthetic experience, whereas in the legal arena of modern democracies they achieved the status of citizens equally subject to rights and obligations.

The industrial revolution and the increase in literacy shaped the middle-class public, an imagined group that brought together dispersed individuals connected through occasional mass rallies, places for regular cultivated activity e. In the nineteenth century, this fictitious community transformed 98 For regulations on the organization, subjects, contents, procedures, and sanctions of Austrian censorship prior to the March Revolution of see the detailed study by Janez Kranjc Censorship regulations also covered banned conceptual and literary currents such as Deism and Materialism, and the literature of Young Germany.

These regulations only laid down the upper limits of what was allowed, whereas censors qualified the subjects of their treatment according to their own judgment using four main categories reflecting the public impact of texts: Now the objects of legal and repressive protection were no longer merely the secular and ecclesiastical au- thorities and the orthodoxy of opinion, but also public morality elevated to a social good. Citizens and informal groups joined those that defended public morality. On the other hand, the literary field emerged cf. Due to its referential at- tachment to reality, the textual world of works of fiction, especially realistic ones, came into conflict not only with the reputation of the authorities but also the good name and morals of individual members of the middle class, and professional and local communities.

The court trial, which Flaubert ultimately won, was accompanied by scandals and pressure from the alliance formed by conservative public opinion, reader protests, criticism, censorship, and the judiciary. Although Flaubert steadfastly claimed that the story 99 For more, see Dumesnil In the summer of that same year, another founder of literary modern- ism and aesthetic autonomy, Charles Baudelaire, author of Les fleurs du mal The Flowers of Evil , was convicted at the same court.

The modern aestheticism of Flaubert and Baudelaire was obviously accepted in public and judicial discourses in the mimetic key of realism. Today, literature has already reached a position in which well-known writers are sued by people that are not public figures. Writers have always borrowed his- torical figures and names and used descriptions of both well-known and unknown flesh-and-blood people, merging them into fictional characters in Frankenstein fashion.

One precedent is a case that took place in the Federal Republic of Germany from to , although this time the defendant was not a writer, but the publisher that wanted to print his work. In , the German constitutional court, to which the affected publishers appealed against the previous rulings, had to decide More details about the case and the text of the judgment are available at http: When a real person recognizes him- or herself in a character of a novel and feels insulted due to the offensive fictional depiction, two equal interests and citizens face one another in court: For Posner, fiction is not an automatic alibi that excludes the possibility that a small circle of empirical readers would not be able to believe the things written.

Like the German constitutional court in the case of Mephisto, Posner also believes it is essential that the court weigh the benefit that an individual involved in the judicial dispute might receive and reflect on the benefits and losses of the broader society and its groups and activities if the case law favored protecting privacy and personal reputation or protecting creative and artistic freedom. Theory It is necessary to turn from history to theory for a different approach to the consideration provoked by the Pikalo case.

Anyone that defends the freedom of literary art today must bid farewell to a simplified understanding of the lessons about the autonomy and quasi-reality of fiction and revisit the relationship be- tween a literary text and reality. In the Pikalo case, this relationship opens through the referentiality of personal names and descriptions of literary characters. According to Iser, fiction is a textual process or modus operandi developed in writing and reading through three acts: The usual link to the actual world is nonetheless not set aside, because reality remains the background for comparisons with the fictional world Iser In the dualistic tradition of European metaphysical thought marked by the splits between the subject and object and appearance and truth, fiction was the opposite of nonfic- tion whether comprehended as truth and factuality or textual representation that faithfully depicts reality.

It also makes sense to differentiate between fictional and fictive in English: She identified fiction through seemingly objective symptoms such as the use of the epic preterit, which is not related to expressing the past time, deictics e.