Page 12 - Vinkler, Jonatan, Ana Beguš and Marcello Potocco. Eds. 2019. Ideology in the 20th Century: Studies of literary and social discourses and practices. Koper: University of Primorska Press
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Ideology in the 20th Century: studies of literary and social discourses and practices

al discourse analysis is mainly concerned with the analysis of ideological
narratives in the content and thus neglects the analysis of the technolog-
ical interface as an epistemological frame that the user is unaware of be-
cause this interface is naturalised (default) in the given cultural context.
An outline of the today’s technological ecosystem is presented with an
emphasis on vaporwave as an exemplary genre of the new media culture
and its relation to traditional (printed) cultural forms.

For the purpose of his examination of how literature and art take
part in the circulation of significations and representations in the con-
struction of social reality, Tomaž Toporišič also crosses boundaries be-
tween genres. He uses novels by Winfried Georg Sebald, his wanderings
between ‘signs’, punctuated by black and white photographs—Nicolas
Bourriaud defines as emblematic of a mutation in our perception of space
12 and time, in which history and geography operate as a cross-fertilisation,
tracing out paths and weaving networks. Sebald’s novels are confront-
ed with the productions by the Bosnian-Croatian theatre director Oliver
Frljić, with his disturbing, shocking performances in which he uses his
own personal, wartime and political traumas to raise the universal ques-
tions about the boundaries of artistic and social freedom, individual and
collective responsibility, tolerance and stereotypes. Beyond examining
the contestation of subject positions, this chapter follows border-crossing
figures to the shifting battlefields of today’s Europe and beyond. It con-
centrates on the dialectics of ‘art’ and ‘society’, where fluid, incontainable
subjects are constantly pushing the contours. Revising the critical con-
sensus that contemporary art primarily engages with the real, the essay
describes how theatre and fiction today navigate the complexities of the
discourse as well as social realities of neo-liberalism in the age of terror-
ism. The paper takes a look at how art negotiates, inflects and participates
in the discursive circulation of stories, idioms, controversies, testimonies,
and pieces of (mis)information in the face of global uncertainties.

Vladimir Gvozden explores a more subtle level of ideology, both in
fiction and society. Literary works must end, he claims, even when they
deny that ending. The endings of existence (including fiction) are count-
less (for example, the end of childhood, schooling time, friendship, rela-
tionships, working time, reading a book). In this sense, the ending is im-
manent to existence as much as it is inherent to fictional narration. Of
course, if there is an ending, there is a beginning, and there is time be-
tween the two. There are also events that just resemble an ending. The
main thesis of Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the
Theory of Fiction is that fiction and existence are closely related because
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