engleski

Subversive power of province as 'a fire-swept zone of mind': Examples from Croatian and Irish Literatures

My paper discusses the notion of province by taking into consideration recent tendencies to redefine the meaning of 'space' in humanistic disciplines. The term 'province' implies 'space' in its own right since it has been originally defined as geographical space with clearly set boundaries, as well as administratively subordinated space. Given the fact that the dialectics between the centre and the periphery has been changing in the course of time, seen from the perspective of more generally defined 'spatiality' this dichotomy acquires a new, protean meaning. Since political and strategic power of the centre has been generally decreasing and therefore the boundaries of the centre and the periphery have become mobile, even shifting, the intersections between these two 'spaces' are more common, which overtly destabilizes the fixed values that the centre used to embody. Considering the context of globalisation and the undergoing changes of the landscape of urban culture it seems that throughout the history these relationships have becoming more complex and as such reflect also in literature. These reflections are particularly interested in the literatures of the so-called 'small' nations, which are peripheral in relation to the European centre. Simulating in different discursive situations an uneasy feeling of displacement, the rhetoric of province in literature is marked by implied or overt cynicism toward the centre, the metropolis. In Croatian literature 'the province' initially meant mainly the 'topos' constituted by the binary oppositions 'the village' and 'the city', 'rural' and 'urban' but nowadays implies much more complex dynamics underlying the relationships between 'the metropolis' and 'the periphery', both within and beyond the national borders. Therefore, I apply the term 'province' as a synthetic term in order to read mental geographies. Since in this context the conventional attributes of the province 'backwardness', 'narrow-mindedness' have ambivalent meaning I am interested in exploring the subversive power of the province as the metaphor for a 'fire step zone of mind'. After outlining briefly the general diachronic similarities between some aspects of Irish and Croatian culture and literature, in order to illustrate the above-mentioned problems, my essay draws on the examples from Croatian and Irish literatures, in particular the works by Brian Friel and Edna O'Brian.

province; periphery/centre; spatiality; space/place; Croatian literature; Irish literature

Prošireno i prerađeno izlaganje koje je objavljeno uvršteno je u IASIL bibliografiju, Irish University Review 2009.