Kosovo declared its independence nine years ago, and, with more than 100 UN countries recognizing the new country already, it has emerged as a new nation on the political map of the world. The article discusses Kosovo’s emergence as a nation and state and its ramifications for political discourse and indeed national or pan-national politics in Kosovo and Albania in the first place. How did writers and fighters – representatives of cultural enlightenment and militant struggle – create an autonomous Kosovar polity initially, before it became an independent country in its own right at the turn of the century and millennium? Will there soon be separate histories of Albanian and Kosovar national literature, culture, art, etc., against this backdrop? These and a range of other issues will be explored.
This article focuses on stylistic choices in the novel Im atë donte Adolfin (My father loved Adolph) by the Albanian author in Kosovo Mehmet Kraja (2005) as a strategy to generate a post-communist perspective of interpreting history. By blending first-person narration as confidentiality and third-person narration as conventionality (Barthes, 1978), the possessive construction ‘my father’ in this literary text serves both as referential label and deictic, generating dual focalization (Phelan, 2005). The heterodiegetic narrator is positioned simultaneously as a neutral eye witnessing narrator and as a signal of subjectivity. Even in cases of intradiegetic role the narrator remains detached interweaving his voice with the voice of the character. The synchronized overt and distant narratorial stances in this novel correspond with the demonstration of historical discourse as both subjective and factual narration. The relationship between fiction and truth has been widely treated in the post-modern intellectual thought, and as Borg (2010) points out in his study on Beckett and Joyce, the radical narrative innovations are “examples of a peculiarly modernist engagement with the nature of factual and fictional truth” (p. 179), suggesting that in modern literary texts “every event exists factually and fictionally at the same time” (p. 187). As a resonance to Borg’s analysis of modernist literature, in Kraja’s novel the knowledge about history consists of both factual and imaginative elements, bringing “the moment of truth in all its potential” (p. 191).
The relationship between literature and philosophy has led to the inflow of 'small' literature from 'big' literatures within the interaction between literary time and literary space with a propensity to emerge ‘big' again in another literary time and space. The most influential factor in ‘making it new' or 'from big to small, and big again' turns out to be time on account of the fact that the literary creator, namely the poet, is mortal. Since the existence of a poet as a creator turns out to be ‘temporal’, ‘making it new’ turns out to be vital for the next temporality. Therefore, this paper, using the document research method, examines Pound's poetry refracted through the time and literary space of his creative existence, as the urge for translation became an influential factor for Pound himself as a ‘new’ author. Thus, the paper analyses ‘temporal overlapping’ under the inspiring influence of Pound's poetic re-creation, either as a conversion of translated matter or as its enhancement by the poets he read. The divergent takes on mimesis by Plato and Aristotle helps Pound's creative originality, whereas J. Hillis Miller’s reading of the theory of temporality of De Mann and Heidegger, as well as the time-space transformations, help clarify 'temporal overlapping'. These, in turn, make us believe that the creation of ‘new originality’ influenced by ‘old originality’ during the transformation of time into space brings about the immortality of the poet along with ‘the little big’ literature. Received: 7 October 2021 / Accepted: 29 November 2021 / Published: 3 January 2022
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