COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SOUTH SLAVIC LITERATURE - EXPERIENCES AND PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

The first part gives an overview of the basic trends of comparative study of literature in the last century on European and American areas, with particular emphasis on changes in epistemological assumptions and methodological approaches influenced by gnoseological and dialectical horizons that have brought new literary theoretical paradigms in the last decades 20. century. It brings a diachronic sketch of the history of the South Slavic literatures and the reading of the South Slavic literatures, which, by varying intensity and volume of academic work, intensely or affectively, reflected the continuity of the comparative approach to the literatures of the South Slavs. In the climate of socio-political changesbrought about by the inevitable dissolution of the Yugoslav state community, inertial differentiation and the alienation and mutilation of South Slavic cultures, since the early 1980s, we have been followingattempts to find new patterns and a platform for comparative study of South Slavic literatures. Although welcome pluralism is present today in the South Slavic intercultural space in understanding the conceptsof national, comparative and world literature, their ontological-empirical relationship, the concept of interliterary community and the theory of the interliterary process by Dionýz Ďurišin seems, in the urrent transitional-globalization context, as the most perspective a platform for future South Slavic comparative literature and the inter-literary/intercultural history of South Slavic literatures. The paper concludes with texts and books that demonstrate a kind of consensus on this issue, visible over the past two decades in almost all key academic centers of the former Yugoslav republics.