Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to a public lecture at the Literature in context doctoral module by Aina Vidal-Pérez:

Global Mediterranean: Representations of the Coast in Crisis in the Contemporary Novel (1990–2020).

The lecture in English language will be on Thursday, 26th of May 2022, at 2.30 P.M. at Mala Dvorana ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 4, 2nd floor, Ljubljana.

Despite the scarcity of critical studies on the matter, the Mediterranean Sea as a globalized and as such environmentally vulnerable space has gained significant attention in the field of the novel over the last three decades. Starting from a conception of the global novel as a critical framework, the talk will approach representations of the Mediterranean Sea as a space traversed by accelerated and overlapped crises. The sea will be addressed as a complex narrative environment concerned with multi-scale issues such as extractivism, deterritorialization, neocolonialism, cosmopolitanism, migration, mass tourism, state and global violence, and, in particular, the environmental crisis and the Anthropocene. Focusing on novels by Donna Leon, Rafael Chirbes, Zena el Khalil, and Ahmed Khaled Tawfik among others, the talk will carry out an analysis that considers, on the one hand, the narrative strategies arising from such tensions, and, on the other, the circulation of these narratives at different scales by considering both the Mediterranean and the novel as objects as well as agents of globalization.

Aina Vidal-Pérez is a PhD Candidate in the Humanities and Communication Doctoral Programme at the Open University of Catalunya. She holds a PhD Fellowship (FI 2019) of the Government of Catalonia, co-funded by the European Social Fund, and is a member of the Global Literary Studies Research Lab (GlobaLS-UOC); she is also on the team of the research project “The Novel as Global Form. Poetic Challenges and Cross-border Literary Circulation,” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Her PhD project is dedicated to narrative representations of the Mediterranean shore from a global perspective. In relation to this topic, her contribution to The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction and Ecology is forthcoming in 2023.

Kindly invited!

Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to a public lecture by prof. Ljiljana Pajović Dujović:

Social and cultural context of Montenegrin society through the prism of the traditional wedding practice.

The lecture in English language will be on Wednesday, 25th of May 2022, at 11. A.M. at Mala Dvorana ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 4, 2nd floor, Ljubljana.

The paper aims at emphasizing the importance of customs as one of significant elements of cultural identity. Due to a wide range of customs inherent in Montenegrin society and culture, we here focus on the customs relating to the organization of the nuptials ceremony, including all stages and rituals which follow. In order to comprehensively approach the analysis of wedding customs and grasp their importance, we have taken into consideration the comparison between traditional (patriarchal) and modern wedding practices, as well as the analysis of the orientation of values which pervade traditional practices at different levels of social and cultural development.

Keywords: traditional wedding practices, patriarchal culture, collectivist and individualist orientation of values, socialization, dowry, internalization of social reality.

Ljiljana Pajović Dujović, PH.D. is full professor of South Slavic Literature at the Faculty of Philology – Nikšić, University of Montenegro. Her interests are the study of the relationship between folk traditions and narrative prose, the problem of intertextuality of the oral and the written, comparative literature and imagology. She has published a number of scientific papers in the field of cultural studies, literary history, literary theory and criticism.

Kindly invited!

Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to a public lecture by dr. Sanja Šubarić:

Word meaning and the meaning content of the collective names of the type Montenegrin.

The lecture in English language will be on Tuesday, 24th of May 2022, at 11. A.M. at Mala Dvorana ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 4, 2nd floor, Ljubljana.

In this presentation we will first explain the notion of meaning, and then draw attention to the importance of reflecting on the lexicographic model for defining the meaning of lexemes representing signifiers of ethnic and civic identity.

With a concrete example, here we want to emphasize the fact that in the case of certain lexemes it is not easy to determine their semantic content. That is the case with ethnonyms and demonyms, that is, lexemes naming a given ethnic group (a group of people)/residents of a particular place or country. It is certain that the terms ethnonym and denonym do not have equal status in onomastic and derivational systems, and that is also the case with lexicographic theories within different languages. Their uneven treatment has been confirmed in the available dictionaries of English, Russian and French, but also in the dictionaries of Serbo-Croatian, namely Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. Keeping in mind terminological specificities of internationalisms demonym and ethnonym, insufficiently elaborated in the linguistic literature, we will also focus on the semantic content of the concepts narod and stanovnik (people and resident).

A semantic examination of the lexemes narod (people) and stanovnik (resident) also leads to the question – how to distinguish the name of people from the name of residents of the country since the members of people who have their country are mostly its residents, too?

The claim that a member of an ethnic group / group of people is the same as “a resident of the land (state)” is not realistic from the perspective of the demographic reality of multi-ethnic countries. In fact, the claim is denied by the fact that there are usually members of different ethnic groups / groups of people in one country, and also by the fact that certain ethnic groups / groups of people do not possess their own state.

Lexicographic review has shown that there is not the established model for defining concrete names, which would be a reflection of what is recognized as the ideal type of identity in the sociological literature – as an identity that includes ethnic-cultural and territorial-political/civic elements? Certainly, the model for defining these names cannot be solely a linguist’s task – a good solution requires an interdisciplinary approach. In relation to that, we will emphasize the following: it is necessary that the sociological discernment of the concept of identity has its application in lexicography, which means that the collective names as Montenegrin, Albanian, Croate, Slovene…, have to be treated as ethnonyms and as demonyms in lexicography, that is, as categories that represent the ethnic identity of the referent, but also as categories that represent a civic, that is, territorial identity of the referent.

Sanja Šubarić graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšić, at the Department of Serbo-Croatian Language and Yugoslav literary. She acquired Master Degree in Linguistic Sciences at the Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšić; the degree of Doctor of Philology she acquired at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade defending the thesis on Language in documents of the Montenegrin Senate. At the Faculty of Philology, she teaches Contemporary Serbian language (Standardization and Spelling), Contemporary Serbian language (Phonetics and Phonology), Discourse Analysis and Introduction to Linguistics.

She works on the synchronic and diachronic studies of language at different levels, as well as interdisciplinary topics in the field of linguistics. Author of several articles published in national and international journals and proceedings. Member of the Association for Applied Linguistics of Montenegro. She has participated in several research projects of national importance – The study of Montenegrin written literary-linguistic expressions of the second half of the 19th century (the Ministry of Education and Science and the University of Montenegro), Linguistic explorations (Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts), The study of written linguistic expression in Montenegro (Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts). For two years now she has been devoted to lexicographic work within Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Kindly invited!

Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to public seminars by dr. Cindy Zeiher.

Cindy Zeiher is senior lecturer at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand were she teaches critical theory. Her writings explore Freudian-Lacanian interventions and interpretations concerning contemporary questions of ontology. She is currently working on a book which interrogates Vladimir Janklevitch’s radical ‘refusal’ of politics from the perspective of Lacan’s theory of the speech-act. Cindy is co-editor of CT&T: Continental Thought and Theory and is currently training as a Lacanian psychoanalyst.

Seminar I. on Monday, 7th March 2022 at 07:00 PM | Warsaw | via ZOOM:

Sensation(all) Ontology.

It is the praxis of being a subject in the world which enables psychoanalysis to theorise subjectivity. Freud theorised subjectivity from the perspective of desires, those repressed unconscious forces which conflict with the subjects’ need to live in the world. The upshot of this conflict for the subject is trauma and for psychoanalysis such trauma provides a way into a remedy, a cure, the presumption of psychoanalysis being that through its method of transference, it does indeed possess the knowledge to pursue a remedy.

Lacan offers a new interpretation of Freud by considering the subject as an ongoing ontological enigma in so far as subjective unconscious desire is not only (potentially) traumatic but necessarily (always) linguistic. How is this an ontological enigma? For Lacan the subject is first and foremost a speaking being engaged in an ongoing struggle to articulate unconscious desire. This is because, claims Lacan, we are born into language which not only pre-exists us but continues after death. In this way subjectivity is inescapably oriented to language as simultaneously intrinsic external to it. The unconscious is therefore a mixture of inside and outside, an enigmatic (pre)ontological space which Lacan calls extimacy.

This seminar seeks to explore Lacan’s orientation of the subject towards extimacy as the site of subjective conflict where, in its quest for the subject’s desire to know and handle the symptom, transference engages a new ontological dimension.

Reading:

• Miller, Jacques-Alain. (2008). Extimity. The Symptom.

Seminar II. on Monday, 16th of May 2022 07:00 PM | Warsaw | via ZOOM:

Where is Dora’s Mother?

My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but Father said: ‘I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel-case.’

We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up.

(Sigmund Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Standard Edition, Vol. VII, p. 64).

Much to Freud’s chagrin, Dora chose to remain silent following analysis with him. Dora was a great disappointment to him, a failure he did not hesitate to hide. She ended the sessions in outrage at Herr K’s declaration that his wife Frau K did not mean anything to him and that he no longer desired her. As the story goes, ‘The Lake Scene’ depicts his clumsy attempt to seduce her and make her his mistress. To us now, Dora’s persistent cough during analysis in which her mother is hardly mentioned, signals a strange malady of the voice. Freud did cure Dora’s cough, but not it seems her anguish, whilst because Freud privileged paternity, Dora’s mother remained an unanswered question.

What was so traumatic about Dora’s revelation of Herr K’s attempt to seduce her was not only his dogged persistence but also his sundry dismissal of Frau K without understanding that she was in the position of feminine jouissance for Dora. Dora confided in Frau K, sometimes at length; she enjoyed her company and trusted her. What is also striking is that Dora’s mother, usually portrayed as obsessively neurotic, is given no part to play in the unravelling relationships of this bourgeois Viennese family. In Écrits Lacan also barely mentions her in his critique of Freud, instead commenting on Otto, Dora’s brother. This is a curious omission, given that the Mother, the original object of desire, is a pivotal concept of psychoanalysis.

This seminar attempts to track a different reading of Dora’s Mother, not as failed feminine jouissance or as an obsessive woman trapped in a loveless marriage, but rather as a case of silenced jouissance from which Dora’s mother peripherally contributes to her daughter’s burning question: what does it mean to be a woman?

Reading:

• Sigmund Freud: Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (‘Dora’): 1901: SE vol. VII: p1-122 or Penguin Freud Library: Vol 8 – Case Histories I: 1990. Please read pp. 70-108 specifically

Kindly invited!

Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to a public lecture by Dr. Ulf Brunnbauer:

Southeastern Europe as a Laboratory of Migration Research: What Turns Emigration into a Story?

The lecture in English language will be on Tuesday, 10th of May 2022, at 1 P.M. at Mala Dvorana ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 4, 2nd floor, Ljubljana.

Ulf Brunnbauer is Director of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg and Professor in Southeast and East European History at the University of Regensburg. He has a PhD in history from the University of Graz (1999) and a habilitation from the Free University of Berlin (2006). His research concentrates on the social history of Southeastern Europe since the 19th history, with a particular interest on the migration, labour relations, family patterns, environment, and social change. His last book “In den Stürmen der Transformation” provides a longue history of the post-socialist transformation on the example of two shipyards. In 2016, his book “Globalizing Southeastern Europe” on overseas emigration since the 19th century was published.

Kindly invited!

Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to a public lecture by dr. Joseph Grim Feinberg:

Karel Teige, the Czech Avant-garde, and the “New Folk Culture”.

The lecture in English language will be on Tuesday, 29th March 2022, at 3 p.m. at Mala Dvorana ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 4, 2nd floor, Ljubljana.

Because the avant-garde presented itself as a revolt against tradition, it has become easy to assimilate it into historical narratives of progressive creative individuals standing up to conservative popular tastes and traditions. A closer look, however, reveals a much more complex relationship between the avant-garde and the notion of folklore. While some forms of folklore could appear as the worst embodiment of all that was wrong with art and society, in other forms it appeared as an alternative source of collective, festive consciousness, which could lift modern society out of the bourgeois marasmus. In this talk, Joseph Grim Feinberg examines the attitude toward “the folk” and “folk culture” in the work of the leading theorist of the Czech avant-garde, Karel Teige. For Teige, the notion of a “new folk culture” offered a pathway toward collective political subjectivity that lay outside the traditional bounds of politics and art, which opened the way for Teige’s exploration of the poetic and irrational dimensions of everyday subjectivity as conditions for revolutionizing the world.

Joseph Grim Feinberg is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and editor of the journal Contradictions. He is author of The Paradox of Authenticity: Folklore Performance in Post-Communist Slovakia (2018) and co-editor of Karel Kosík and the Dialectics of the Concrete (2022). He is currently co-editing an English translation of Karel Teige’s Marketplace of Art (forthcoming 2022).

Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to a public lecture by Prof. Lev Kreft:

From Marx to Majstorović: Between Democratization of Culture and Cultural Democracy – abstract.

The lecture in English language will be on Wednesday, 15^th December 2021, at 5. p. m. via ZOOM.

To understand the relationship between equality and equity in the politics of culture of the socialist Yugoslavia from 1960s and 1970s, it is necessary to start with young Marx’s criticism of political emancipation. Hegelian reading of young Marx was very influential, and as it included liberal wing of the League of Communists it had nearly hegemonic position in academia, but with a caveat: to use Marx’s critical method in domestic political matters may be unwelcome, even dangerous. Cultural politics had three characteristics which are still of interest: self-management of culture which meant that fields of material production and of culture exchanged their good soutside market and through agreement of cultural producers and cultural recipients; non-alignment international politics which included struggle for de-Westernization of international – world culture; and democratization of culture through cultural action. These and other features of Yugoslav cultural politics needed theoretical/ideological support, and it emerged in many forms of different theories of culture and its revolutionary importance for socialism. Among these was one that transgressed its supportive use – that of Stevan Majstorović who introduceddifferentiation between democratization of culture from cultural democracy. Itcorresponds to the difference and tension between equality and equity asconcerning the right to culture.

Kindly invited!

We are kindly inviting you to the first information days for:

• 2nd cycle master study study Earth and Environmental Sciences, that is going to be held on Wednesday, 26th of May 2021 at 4 p.m via ZOOM (link, Meeting ID: 832 6472 2284, Passcode: 309533) and
• 3rd cycle doctoral study Environmental and Regional Studies, that is going to be held on Thursday, 27th of May 2021 at 4 p.m. via ZOOM (link, Meeting ID: 884 8533 6434, Passcode: 577477).

Call for enrolment is available at – link.

The Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU had their Facebook Page taken down after the apparent use of forbidden words in one of their events. Within minutes of the post, Facebook deleted their Facebook page, along with the personal profiles of every page admin.

By the best estimate, this was an automated process initiated by a Facebook algorithm.

Active social media users may have noticed the recent uptick in people using clever ways of disguising keywords in their posts. Such tactics are employed to avoid detection by the algorithms of Facebook and other platforms. A common method is using an asterisk in a word to obscure its meaning to the algorithm while retaining its meaning for the reader. (Examples: q*non, s*x, c*nspiracy, etc.). The poster is doing this because they believe that, based on the use of certain words, social media site algorithms will cause their profiles to be ranked lower in search results or worse.

The event in question announced the talk about Conspiracy theories. The description of the talk, titled “Reality as Conspiracy”, featured one word that is considered forbidden by Facebook’s algorithm.

Facebook did not provide any warning or explanation for the page removal but is confident that using the word “QAnon” is what caused the problem. Unfortunately for the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU, Facebook has not provided any feedback nor any opportunity to have the Page reinstated so the exact reason for removal is not known with certainty. The Facebook’s algorithm in question appears to focus on keywords while not discriminating based on the content of the post itself. This puts posts about conspiracy theories on the same footing as posts which decry them.

The conspiracy theorists may even have an advantage. As we noted, the individuals perpetuating conspiracy theories find ways around the algorithm, while people that don’t engage in conspiracy theories but critically adres this problem and institutions, who aim to hold honest academic discussions about them, are punished.

Because of this the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU has opened a Twitter account and is actively trying to find a way how to return to Facebook platform.

Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to a public lecture by Prof. Norbert Bachleitner:

Translation Studies and Book History Illustrated with German Translations of Scott and Flaubert.

The lecture in English language will be on Thursday, 20th of May 2021 at 11 a. m. via ZOOM (link, meeting ID: 869 7207 3300, passcode: 005101).

The systems approach of book history should be applied to the study of translations, because it sheds light on the agents who influence their genesis and distribution – such as mediators, translators, publishers, censors and readers. In the 1820s, which saw a significant increase in book production and translation, the translation of Walter Scott’s works was mainly carried out as ‘hackwork’ by ‘speculative’ publishers unhindered by international copyright protection. In Austria, translations of his work were censored in order to conform to religious and political standards. Despite such interventions, Scott quickly became a favourite of the German reading public, as reflected in unprecedented print runs. Flaubert shared a similar fate: integrated into a popular novel series, the first German translation of Madame Bovary abounds with traces of the translator’s self-censorship.

Norbert Bachleitner is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna/Austria. He was visiting professor at various universities including the Sorbonne nouvelle in Paris and is a member of the Academia Europaea. His fields of interest include the reception of English and French literature in the German speaking area; literary translation and transfer studies; social history of literature; censorship; literature in periodicals; intertextuality, and digital literature. His most recent book publications are Die literarische Zensur in Österreich von 1751 bis 1848 (Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau, 2017; English translation forthcoming) and (ed., together with Ina Hein, Karoly Kókai and Sandra Vlasta) Brüchige Texte, brüchige Identitäten. Avantgardistisches und exophones Schreiben von der klassischen Moderne bis zur Gegenwart (Göttingen: Vienna University Press, 2018), (ed., together with Achim Hölter and John A. McCarthy) Taking Stock – Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research (Leiden, Boston: Brill 2020) and (ed.) Literary Translation, Reception, and Transfer (Proceedings of the ICLA Conference in Vienna 2016, vol. 2, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter 2020).

Kindly invited!