May ’68 in Literature and Theory: The Last Season of Modernism in France, Slovenia, and the World

Project website

Project code: J6-9384
SICRIS

The proposed research project will intervene in the study of the global student and labour movement that erupted in May 1968 by systematically analyzing two so far neglected but key aspects: the dimensions of the literary and the semi-peripheral. It will analyze how critical theory and late modernist, neo-avant-garde literature were related to these protests, which, opposing institutional politics of the late sixties and early seventies, struggled for the socio-economic transformation of both the capitalist world-system and its second-world socialist alternative.

Neo-avant-garde literature and theory broke with both the bourgeois and the socialist version of the institution of art, including the respective canonical interpretations of literature in mainstream humanities and the school apparatus. Thus, literature and theory, regardless of their differences ([post]structuralist theory’s antihumanism vs. literature’s postexistentialist individualism), opened the possibility of taking the utopian-transformative impulse from the realm of thought into political action, and from concepts and aesthetic feelings into everyday life. The project will compare developments in capitalist Paris, the core of the modern literary world-system and the global exporter of theory, and socialist Ljubljana, a literary semi-periphery that nevertheless kept up with France by producing a theory that came to be recognized worldwide (the Ljubljana School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis), and a literary and artistic neo-avant-garde that, together with other contributions from the global (semi-)periphery, revitalized the immunized modernism of the Western core (e.g, the ludism and conceptualism of the OHO group).

Results
Juvan, Marko (ur.). Med majem ’68 in novembrom ’89: transformacije sveta, literature in teorije. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2021.

Habjan, Jernej. Introduction: May ’68 at Fifty. Interventions 23.3 (2021): 349–355.

Mandić, Lucija. Literatura in teorija v Tribuni in Studentu leta 1968. Slavistična revija 69.1 (2021): 53–67.

Habjan, Jernej. Introduction: 1968 Thought and Its Usual Suspects. European Review, 23. 6. 2020: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798720000800.

Juvan, Marko. Literature, Theory and Politics of the Long ’68: The Last Season of Modernism and Peripherality. European Review, 16. 6. 2020: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798720000848.

Habjan, Jernej, in Andraž Jež (ur.). May ’68 in Yugoslavia (= Slavica TerGestina 24.1 /2020/).

Habjan, Jernej. The Global Process of Thinking Global Literature: From Marx’s Weltliteratur to Sarkozy’s littérature-monde. Journal of Global History 14.3 (2019): 395–412.

Juvan, Marko. Peripheral Modernism and the World-System: Slovenian Literature and Theory of the Nineteen-Sixties. Slavica Tergestina 23.2 (2019): 168–199.

Gabrič, Aleš. Jože Pučnik on a Path to Becoming a Dissident. Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino 57.3 (2018): 78–93.

Habjan, Jernej. Rancière’s Lesson: October ’17, May ’68, October ’17. CR: The New Centennial Review 18.3 (2018): 53–71.