Gjurgjan, Ljiljana Ina.
(2009).
Ivo Vidan’s anthropological/cultural comparativism.
Umjetnost riječi : časopis za znanost o književnosti, 53(3-4).
pp. 207-220.
ISSN 0503-1853
Abstract
Ivo Vidan played an important role in the definition of the Zagreb school of critical thought. A professor of English literature, Vidan received his Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham for a thesis on Conrad. This had an important impact on his further research interests which were in many respects cultural and postcolonial though Vidan never used either term. Instead, in his book-long studies he uses the terms context (Texts in Context), intertext (English Intertext of Croatian Literature) and aura (Explicating the Aura). The sequence of these terms points to an important
shift in his theoretical approach. In the first book he is concerned with the ways in which a context participates in the production of a text. In his second book his interest shifts to the operations of intertextuality. In his last book, Vidan returns to the question of contexts, now described in terms of an aura, the metaphor suggesting
the dynamics between the meaning of the text and the context in which it is realized. Writing about Croatian literature in comparison to its European, in particular Anglophone context, Vidan states that such a comparison should not be evaluative, or as he puts it: »It is not the actual amount of borrowing [...] that matters most, but the function which these borrowings acquire in their new context. Our concern is not only with what they contribute to the Croatian text but also how these appropriations from foreign sources make part of the world view [...]«, SRAZ, 1997: 391–392). This approach, which can be described as anthropological/ cultural comparativism, is close to the postcolonial understanding of the dynamics between the »centre« and »periphery« (Said, Gibbons), whereby the periphery is not only influenced by the centre, but also contributes to it.
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