MARKO JUVAN LITERARY SELF-REFERENTIALITY AND THE FORMATION OF THE NATIONAL LITERARY CANON THE TOPOI OF PARNASSUS AND ELYSIUM IN THE SLOVENE POETRY OF THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES The author discusses the process of nationalizing literature, that is, the formation of a na- tional literary canon in Slovene poetry from the Enlightenment to Post-Romanticism. The utopian projection and formation of a “Slovenised” literary system has been intertwined with the successful establishment of a unified Slovene literary language. The use of im- ages of Parnassus and Elysium, these topoi in the European cultural memory, was one of the self-regulatory strategies acquired by Slovene writers to mark the distinction between their own discourse and the norms of the “classics” and a competitive comparison with other modern national literatures in order to achieve integration into the canon of “world literature”. National literary canon is usually considered the textual and institutional basis which enables literature to become a medium of cultural memory and a vehicle of national identity. The notion of the canon 1 indicates the instruments of representation, activi- ties, agencies, interests, and strategies that lead to the fact that, in a given culture, a special corpus of texts and authors was selected, summed up, structured and repro- duced under similar criteria of significance. This corpus, consisting of few “eternal masterpieces” in its center and larger, historically more flexible, selections in periph- ery, remains more or less exemplary for several generations. Primarily, it is used as a set of prototypes of linguo-stylistic correctness, eloquence, literariness, figures of speech, poetic genres, and relevant, prestigious themes. The canon further represents 0324–4652/2004/$20.00 Akadémiai Kiadó © Akadémiai Kiadó Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht Neohelicon XXXI (2004) 1, 113–123 1 Cf. Aleida and Jan Assmann, eds., Kanon und Zensur: Beiträge zur Archäologie der lite- rarischen Kommunikation II (München, 1987); Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus, Kanonbildung in Europa, in: Literarische Klassik, ed. H.-J. Simm (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), 52–58; Charles Altieri, Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1990); Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (Athlone, London; Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1991); John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993). Marko Juvan, Inštitut za slovensko literaturo in literarne vede, ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 5, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. E-mail: marko.juvan@guest.arnes.si