Hvar City Theatre Days, Vol. 37 No. 1, 2011.
Original scientific paper
Memory, remembrance and forgetting: tropes constructing national culture
Ivana Žužul
; Institute for the History of Croatian Literature, Theatre and Music of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Abstract
Different scientific approaches to the problem of nations and nationalism have appeared during the last thirty years. Nations and nationalism are no longer observed as natural, unchangeable and autochthonous processes, but as hybrid, imaginary and artificial activities. The question of the role of cultural practices in the creation of national identity is very often a burning issue for the scholars dealing with the nation state. This paper contributes to this topic. It focuses on the analyses of the roles of literary, but also nonfictional programmatic texts of the Croatian Illyrians who played a key role in constructing the nation as an imaginary community (Anderson). By creating an active context for »modeling« of the Croatian national being, the Illyrians sometimes had to resort to forgetting, refreshing of memory, fabrication of tradition (Hobsbawm), and similar methods in order to imagine a steady and continuous history of the Illyrian movement and inscribe it perspicaciously with new meanings. In that sense, this interpretation is an attempt to illuminate the strategies of memory, remembrance and forgetting as the tropes for construction of the national culture.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
71832
URI
Publication date:
3.5.2011.
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