The Globalization and Americanization of Literature, and Their Echoes in Slovenia
Keywords:
Slovenian literature, literary journals, 20th cent., literary influences, metafiction, postmodernism, globalization, AmericanizationAbstract
The article deals with a question of a link between globalization and Americanization and their mutual relation to the literary writing after World War II. While extensively reflected in most of the fields of human activity, globalization is not easy to define. Yet there is a set of parallels, shared among most of researchers – one is, for example, a strong role of the United States of America’s economy and cultural domination that has constantly been spread simultaneously with a notion of globalization in recent decades. To denote the American face of the globalization in literature, the article uses as its tool claims by many different authors, also the ones with a very opposite viewpoint, such as Tariq Ali and Thomas L. Friedman. In next part the article deals with different aspects of the Americanization and, more general, with the cultural and economic domination of the American idiom and its influences, as seen in Europe. – The second, more applicative but shorter, part of the article is dedicated to the quick view of an ever-expanding influence of the American culture to the Slovene literature between the 1960s and the late 1980s, with the journal Problemi – Literatura as at least in a certain period of time the main proponent of the American – as well as globalized – stroke of references. Most distinguishable characteristic of the Slovene version of an artistic and especially literary Americanization is the subversive point of reference of Slovene authors, translators and editors. At least with Problemi – Literatura, we can follow the stream of influences from beatniks and post-beat underground poets, through politically engaged ultra-modernist poets, to the whole generation from mid- to late 1980s that found its ideological and stylistic affirmation in the metafiction of the American authors such as Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover, who were themselves socially aware and oppositional towards the mainstream American culture.References
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