Pontes
2000
National Literatures
At The End Of The Century
Hundreds of cultures clashing, co-operating, warring and uniting,
disappearing or growing; small cultures closing on themselves, large
cultures whose parts break off and melt with other continents; this
is what Europe has been like for centuries.
Cultures are reduced to distinguishing characteristics in warring
sides, reduced to banners for political, monetary and military power.
But at the heart of any culture lies the testimony and the glorification
of the individual. Cultural development, by its very nature, works
for a liberal society able to protect the individual-the bearer of
culture. Europe has thus repeatedly tried, with more or less adroitness
and good will, to build supranational social structures that would
separate the mechanisms of power from the streams of cultures, so
as to turn cultural differences into a veritable wealth of possibilities.
It seems that the nineties have given an additional spur to the latest
project of the kind. The European Union has already passed the long
way of uniting European cultures in a space free of monetary and military
conflict.
This is where we come to the questions we hope to discuss at Pontes
2000:
Is it possible to turn Europe into a unified space of unlimited flow
for national cultures, free of destructive conflict, where competitiveness
is not articulated through negating the other?
Or will, perhaps, the freedom of financial flow and the boundlessness
of new information technology help the new form of consumers' mentality
to overpower culture?
Will this impoverished scale of values create a new Europe, whose
decadent fall awaits the generations to come?
Where is literature in all that? What does it communicate? Individuals,
cultures, or scales of value? Does it strengthen or weaken the unity
of European space? How much of literature today is created within
individual national cultures, and how much on a European level? Is
there such a thing as European literature?
Can the Internet promote linguistic wealth?
Will the literatures of small European peoples end up like the literatures
of small peoples of Commonwealth, translated into English, leaving
their native languages behind and approaching the market on its own
terms?
Can national literatures disappear at all? The way that literatures
in the so-called "dead languages" have disappeared? Can the dictation
of the majority market be as devastating for national literatures
as national linguistic standards had been for dialectal literature?
… Those are only some of the questions we ask ourselves looking at
Pontes 2000. You are invited to participate on these pages in further
discussion topics to be on this summer's agenda in Krk.
|