Secondary abstract: |
The thesis deals with cultural representations of Self and Other in German newspapers from Styria (Marburger Zeitung and Grazer Tagblatt) and Carniola (LaibacherZeitung) from 1900 to 1914, based on a heterogeneous corpus of literary and journalistic narratives. The thesis focuses on the construction in discourse of "self-images" and their contrasting "other-images", as well as the representational practice of stereotyping and the presence and forms of poetic alterity, such as specific genres (grotesque, fairy tale and legend) and on the plot-level on culturally universal topics such as death, disease and insanity, that are mainly observed in the LaibacherZeitun. This literature and its otherness play an important part in raising the awareness among readers of intercultural experience, in deconstructing the homogeneity of Self and Other, while also functioning as unofficial history, alternative worlds and as a corrective critique of society. The strategies of poetic alterity such as allegorisation and irony, which are characteristic of the discourse in Marburger Zeitung and Grazer Tagblatt, form part of the political and ideological instrumentalization of literature. The study emphasizes the differences in the mediatization of Selfness and Otherness in the three newspapers and their feuilletons, differences which arise from each newspaper's credo and program, as well from the historical context (specific political, cultural and ethnic features) of their locality and region. The representative examples of images of Self and Other in the Marburger Zeitung and Grazer Tagblatt tend towards national distinctiveness, in the sense that collective identification follows the primordial code, which according to Giesen, is the basis for the formation and consolidation of collective identity. In response to the increasing autonomy of Slovenian culture in the cities of Lower Styria, the Slovenian and other ethnicities of Habsburg Central Europe became, through strategies of distinction, constructed as the "hostile stranger". As the medium of collective memory, the newspapers used historical and regional issues to remind their readers of German traditions, customs and rituals, which were based on traditional patterns of symbolic order and offered security amidst the everyday experience with otherness and strangeness. The representations of %distant% cultures, such as Chinese, South African and those from the Middle East, are rooted in a dichotomizing mindset and in othering; moreover, they are staged in rather rigid binary oppositions such as Occident/Orient, Civilization/Barbarism, Culture/Nature etc. The intercultural experience with the otherness discussed in travelogues, oscillates between the poles of fascination and threat. Marburger Zeitung refused to accommodate the heterogeneity of the particular locality, region and multiethnic state of the Habsburg Monarchy and mostly blocked the circulation of cultural elements, for instance by mainly excluding foreign literature from their feuilleton and persisting, along with Grazer Tagblatt, in projecting a homogeneous German culture in Lower Styria. This policy resulted in politically utopian projections of a nationally homogeneous state based on unification with the German Empire, in which case the poetic alterity and the procedures of literary transformation were instrumentalized by relations of power, such as politics. In contrast, the German-speaking periodical from Ljubljana - although it does project the preeminence of German culture - created a third space for its socially and culturally differentiated readers. This expanded its potential for promoting peaceful and tolerant intercultural communication among the different cultures in the transcultural Central European space; cultural mediation along with overcoming and embracing the cultural, political, religious and national differences, as well as heterogeneity and plurality, constituted its main aspirations. |