(Janko Kos and) the Issue of National Identification

Abstract

This essay focuses on the issue of national identification and starts by evaluating studies by several Slovenian philosophers, sociologists, and literary historians (Dušan Pirjevec, Tine Hribar, Ivan Urbančič, Dmitrij Rupel, and Janko Kos). It focuses on some key aspects, as well as the disadvantages of constructivist theories of nation and identity (Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson, Stuart Hall, etc.). Based on the theories of Anthony Smith and Adrian Hastings, it argues for a definition of the nation that takes into consideration both its constructed nature as well as the relative stability and continuity of national identifications. These are inevitably constructed by using existing material and symbolic elements (language, ethnosymbolic tradition, especially common mythology, territory, etc.). However, national identifications can be primarily understood as narrative identifications. Paul Ricoeur’s idea of identification as a narrative identity thus serves as the link for interpreting the junction of national identification and literature as one of the possible agents of national self-representation. Although several social and material practices may serve as a basis for (self)representation – that is, for the production and dissemination of national myths (e.g., the school system, as Althusserian theories imply) – literature may become one of the dominant practices in this process because it is itself constructed as a narration. However, literature may become such an agent mainly if the nation is constructed on the basis of common ethnic and cultural heritage instead of on the principal of ius soli because in such cases the principle of mythological narration overpowers the principle of common territory.