/ 1968
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CULTURAL HERITAGE IN THE DIGITAL WORLD

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The aims of digitization are preservation, accessibility and popularization of cultural heritage. It raises consciousness about the importance of cultural heritage and preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity. It provides small communities with powerful, non-expensive tools to preserve and present their cultural heritage. Wider audiences can have easy access to the world cultural heritage as well as to the local ones. From the viewpoint of the audience, the most important traits of cultural heritage presentations are interactivity and personalization. Sociological approach to the digitization of cultural heritage is focused on two problems: content and access. Which contents will be digitized and who will have access to them depends not only on the cultural criteria (value of cultural contents and cultural needs) but also on technological, economic and social factors: development and spread of ICTs, digital divide (on the global level and within a particular society), IT companies’ business policies, activities of cultural institutions and cultural policy. Several issues can be pointed out relating to digitization of cultural heritage: intellectual property issue, obsoleteness of the data carriers, and long-term economic support for repositories. When speaking about user experience, influence of different contexts on the reception and interpretation of cultural heritage should be discussed. Digital-born cultural contents as well as ‘unintentional archive’ made by internet users pose questions relating to selection, temporary nature of internet platforms, public versus private and commercial versus cultural issues. Digitization of cultural heritage is not a replacement for “live” cultural participation; it is a new tool for the realization of cultural policy aims, as well as a new field of experience and creation of cultural contents.

/ 1968
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THE CULT OF SAINT ARCHANGEL MICHAEL AMONG BENEDICTANS IN THE AREA OF BAR MITROPOLY AND KOTOR EPISCOPACY AS A REFLECTION OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONDITIONS (9TH–13TH CENTURY)

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In the middle of the 9th century, the Benedictan order was on the rise in South Italy. Since the end of the 8th century, Montecasino has been the champion of cultural revival, and a network of abbeys has been established across the regions of Benevento, Puglia, Campania, Calabria and other regions. Members of this order, within European borders, were reputed missionairies who contributed greatly to the christianisation of many Germanic and Slavic peoples. However, the Benedictans from South Italy had suffered attacks by the Saracenes and other invadors who raided and plundered their monasteries, which culminated with their conquer of Montecasino in 883AD. Because of the strengthening of the Byzantine rule, the conditions on the east Adriatic coast seemed far more suitable and stable for life of monastery communities. Also, Slavic population settled back to Byzantine cities, and slowly, they moved towards the coastline zones, building good relations with the urban Roman population. The Slavs had still worshiped old gods or were only partly christianized. In addition to being respected as successful missionaries, the Benedicants raised their monasteries in rural communities close to main roads and city centers, while their way of life fitted in the mentality and habits of an aggrarian society. Christianisation of the Slavic population enabled spreading of cultural models from the city centres under the Byzantine rule, which lead to strenghtening of ideological positions and fortification of their factual rule. On the other side, the Holy See looked benevolently on these efforts, since the Benedictans almost unnoticably contributed to strenghtening of the Roman Church positions in Dalmatia. The Benedictans took their missonary endevours seriously, as we can see from a very smart selection of the cults of saints – primarily patrons of big abbeys.

/ 1968
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CONSUMER SOCIETY AND FASHION

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The aim of this paper is to present the development of the consumer society between the late 19th century and today and to demonstrate the influence fashion has had on the entire process. The first part of the paper offers definitions and arguments concerning the very concept of consumer society. The second part of the paper demonstrates how development of the bourgeois society triggered the need for excessive consumption and all other accompanying social changes in the behaviour of consumers brought on by the new age. The conclusions of the paper involve an argument casting aside the viewpoint that it was actually consumerism that has brought on the democratisation of societies, as well as rejecting the idea that we make free choices when purchasing goods available on the market, while it proves we are under an enormous influence from the environments we originate from and also that our decisions are far from being spontaneous.

/ 1968
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FOE AND THE HANDMAID’S TALE: OLD AND NEW TRUTHS IN J. M. COETZEE’S AND M. ATWOOD’S PROSE

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Analysing the novels Foe and The Handmaid’s Tale from Michel Foucault’s theoretical views in his work What Is an Author?, we may notice how the unclear parts or unexplained details in urtexts, such as the novel Robinson Crusoe and The Bible, give possibilities for different interpretations, truths and new prefigured novels inspired by the original texts. In Coetzee’s and Atwood’s rewritten versions of the canonized stories, there are oscillations of a few different perspectives: postmodern, feminist, postcolonial and postfeminist. The novel Foe, a classic story about Robinson Crusoe has been reconstucted from a postmodern perspective, while in the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, we come across a prefigured version of an episode and a character from The Bible, set in the context of a dystopian society in the future. Challenging imperial and patriarchal discourse at the beginning of the novels (by Susan Barton in Foe and Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale) resembles approaches of feminist works. However, certain scenes and characters (Susan’s attitude of ‘’the colonizer’’ toward Friday in Foe or the position of rebels in The Handmaid’s Tale) may refer to writing stories from postcolonial discourse. Coetzee’s implicit irony, when he depicts mood swings in Susan and Atwood’s implicit condemnation of the Aunts’s cruelty towards the Handmaids, may be interpreted as a postfeminist reaction against contradictions of feminist ideals. All in all, apart from those diverse possibilities for interpretation which the two authors offered during their (re)writing of novels, other truths (notions, speeches and parts of the texts in literature, culture, and religion) were also destabilized and examined in the novels Foe and The Handmaid’s Tale, as our analyses reveal.

/ 1968
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THE NORM, WOMEN WRITERS AND THE TRUTH

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In this paper the author classifies and explains some of numerous examples of marginalisation of significant Serbian female authors from the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century – Milica Stojadinović Srpkinja, Draga Gavrilović, Mileva Simić, Danica Bandić, Milka Grgurova, Jelena J. Dimitrijević. Their works were negatively evaluated by the dominant intepreters, academic professors and the historians of Serbian literature. Contrary to expectations their criticism was not supported by reasoning. Historians also ignored relevant historical events. To to acknowledge a few female authors meant to present them inadequately, mainly as beautiful women or spinsters. Some other discriminatory facts in presenting female writers were connected with the length of analyses, attitude and the language. The dominant interpreters usually named incomplete list of women authors’ works, regularly omitting their translated pieces. There was even an open statement that the author’s gender was a starting point for attributing discriminatory values to male or female authors, in favor of the male ones. As one of the most manipulative strategies, one can point out the obstructions to research and publishing of women authors.

/ 1968
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PERJURY AS THE CURSE OF CONFESSION: TRUTH PROBLEM IN LITERATURE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF POSTMODERN CONFESSION

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The paper deals with the problem of truth in literature from the perspective of the postmodern confession. It tries to analyse the authenticity model of truth in literature, that is, to show the problem of the honesty category in the genre that takes honesty as its basic assumption. The postmodern process of making the truth in literature relative has not bypassed sincerity as the pledge of truth in literature; therefore the attention has been given particularly to the postmodern insights into these questions. Although the theory and the literary-artistic practice in the postmodern period do not offer definite solutions, they clearly show, due to its nature, all the weaknesses of the model of truth in literature, like this one. On the other hand, what is more important here, they resist any attempt to establish the completeness of meaning and the monopoly over the truth in literature. Postmodern attitude towards the truth in the confession is viewed in relation to the theory of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida and in relation to the story Otisak srca na zidu (Heart Print on the Wall) by Borislav Pekić, from his story collection Novi Jerusalim (New Jerusalem), as well as in relation to explicit attitudes of these authors towards the truth in the genre of confession.

/ 1968
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HISTORY AND MYTH IN AUSTRALIAN VOYAGER POETRY

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One of the most significant contributions of the twentieth-century Australian poetry was the invention of the so-called “voyager poetry”. The term, which refers to poems about mariners, maritime adventures, exploration and discoveries, reached its most complete expression in the oeuvre of Kenneth Slessor, arguably one of the most celebrated Australian poets, who is largely considered to be the first authentically modernist voice of Australia. In presenting his most famous poems, such as “The Atlas” and “Five Visions of Captain Cook”, and describing the process of literary mythmaking on which they are based, this paper will rely on Roland Barthes’s definition of contemporary myth as a second-order semiological system. One of the most prominent features of contemporary myth, according to Barthes, is that it distorts historical reality by transforming history into nature. This paper proposes that Slessor uses the same process of distortion in his voyager poems, rooting them in historically or geographically approved facts, only to render those facts universally acceptable as archetypal situations or mythical categories. Our second proposition is that Slessor’s process of mythmaking is ideologically motivated by the rising national sentiment in the aftermath of World War I. Slessor’s major poems were written between 1927 and 1932, the period when Australia strove to establish its political and cultural identity independent of the imperialistic British influences. The analysis of the poems aims to show how available historical and geographical data are universalized in Slessor’s poetry and how they consequently transform history into nature. Whereas historical truth is lost in the process, universal truth is emphasized as a legitimate expression of the state of the modern man.

/ 1968
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ZADIE SMITH’S IRONIC NARRATOR: THE MANY TRUTHS OF MULTICULTURALISM

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Irony mocks truth in language by always implying at least two possible meanings: the literal and the figurative one. As such, irony as a figure of speech is conducive to the topics of Zadie Smith’s writing. The omniscient narrator of White Teeth tells the story of a transnational metropolis in an elaborate, ironic tone, verging on parody, in order to bring out the multifaceted and complex relational network that underlies the identities of the 20th century Londoners. The slippage and ambivalence inherent in verbal irony reflect Smith’s multiethnic setting, where no easy labels of identity apply, just as the meaning of an ironic utterance is not singular and is subject to multiple interpretations. The narrator of White Teeth conveys irony on the extradiegetic level with the function to expose how living in a multiethnic society leads to a deconstruction of the subject’s identity and his deeply-rooted, dogmatic truths about himself and the undying Other.

/ 1968
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WORLD AND TRUTH OF LITERATURE: CAMUS URGING RECONCILIATION

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The article seeks to situate motivationally Camus’ vision of “corrected creation” in literary and ideological controversies of his time. Relying on systematically unrepresented but numerous and explicit reflections on the status of literary and the role of artistic practice, it also intends to point to the theoretical argumenation and aesthetic justification of such a vision. Conclusion is that the seemingly reluctant Camus’ position is the product of a conscious decision – and its implementation – that the task of the artist is primarily to understand and, contrary to the subversive doctrines of the salvation, with his rebellious announcement of considerate revival in the name of justice and beauty, to creatively testify contradictions of his own time and advocate perhaps unconceivable comprehensive reconciliation.

/ 1968
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ARS AMATORIA, THE PROBLEM OF LOVE IN LA MORT LE ROI ARTUS

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The main subject of this paper is the problem of love as shown in the Old French Arthurian romance called the Vulgata Cycle, especially its last part – La Mort le Roi Artus. This thirteenth century romance is the basis for all other Arthurian tales as it represents a summary of all themes associated with the legends of King Arthur and courtly literature, such as the forbidden love between Lancelot and Guinevere, the quest for the Graal and other adventures of the Knights of the Round Table. The main theme however, woven through each of the presented tales throughout the whole work, is love. Whether it’s the amor encompassed with the ideal of the chivalric code emphasizing its spiritual component or profane mortal love, this emotion is omnipresent in the plot. Based on the examples of many different forms of love, the paper will demonstrate the link between how the emotion of love and its manifestations were described in the romance and what the then leading philosophical theories had to say about amor and emotions. With this comparison an attempt will be made to find the connection between prevalences described in the romance and the philosophical truths.