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OCR
IVANA TARANENKOVÁ basis of the canon of Slovak literature, specifically novel writing. Elements of the fictional world, such as characters and the setting, were categorized depending on their allegiance to the national element, that is, "selfhood", and plots were driven by the need to extend this "selfhood", predestined as it was to overcome antagonistic phenomena represented by the “Other”. Similarly, the need to preserve the homogeneity of “selfhood” was asserted by eliminating all centrifugal forces and differentiating phenomena. However, the evolution of national elements was not based on an objective representation of the world being portrayed. Rather, it asserted itself as an effect of covert phenomena. These works of fiction anticipated a state of affairs they regarded as desirable, employing the genres and forms of social utopia. In the context of Slovak culture of this period these literary texts thus represented not only a product of the national culture that asserted its identity, but also helped to bring this about by envisaging a world they aspired to in real life. The genres most suited to this model of fiction were the romance" and Bildungsroman: love stories in which one of the protagonists, who stood for the national principle, would initiate the national awakening of his or her partner, who had become temporarily alienated from it. The protagonists’ union subsequently aimed at the establishment, or renewal, of national life. The harsh juxtaposition that dominates the basic narrative in this model of fiction resulted, in its turn, in melodrama becoming the key form of literary representation, constantly stressing manifestations of good and evil, dominated by powerful emotions and resulting in highly schematic works of literature.” The rejection of modernity and the modern can thus be observed within nineteenth-century Slovak national literature both in terms of ideology, as individualisation and disintegration of a cohesive model of the world threatened 1! I base this view on the definition of romance developed by Northrop Frye, whose works, Anatomy of Criticism and The Secular Scripture, define it as a type of fiction in which the protagonist, who is superior to his environment, performs extraordinary acts. At the same time, Frye defines romance as having a “generic plot”: a genre narrative with an archetypal story projecting the ideal of an ideal society. In terms of nineteenth-century Slovak literature, we might thus speak of the nationally oriented elites’ projection of the creation of a modern national culture. In his book The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, Peter Brooks regards the melodramatic representation regime as an expression of imagination characteristic of literature in the “post-sacral age”, that is, in modern literature of the age of the bourgeois revolutions. He locates its beginnings in Romantic literature and also in authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky: “I remain largely convinced by my own arguments: that melodrama is a form for the post-sacred era, in which polarization and hyperdramatization of forces in conflict represent a need to locate and make evident, legible, and operative those large choices of ways of being which we hold to be of overwhelming importance even though we cannot derive them from any transcendental system of belief.” (Peter Brooks: The Melodramatic Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, New Haven London, Yale University Press, 1995, viii). * 434 +
