“Because Slovaks are the best people in the world and the Slovak language is the most beautiful language in the world”: Defamiliarising the Slovak “Imagined Community” in Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book (original) (raw)
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This book investigates the nature of critical thinking not only through linguistic and sociocultural discourse; rather, the author expands the scope of the argument to include anthropological, political, and sociological perspectives of how one assesses critical thinking and communication. This produces a more nuanced analysis of how fluid language is for differing interlocutors across ethnic communities. Larson provides a good historical overview of the Slovak context including colonialization by various regimes (feudal, totalitarian, socialist), process of protest during Prague Spring (1968), the Velvet Revolution (1989), and the final reconstruction phase (1989–93). The author’s knowledge of the Slovak language and culture provides the reader with a clearer understanding of how language is socioculturally embedded into the thinking process of a culture. More importantly, he is able to highlight ethnic differences between the Slovak and Czech Soviet experience due to variations in pragmatic linguistic interpretations of particular words. The author leads the reader, not just assess language as a static structural component, but a feature of the overall context within a performance act of social discourse. Moreover, there is a strong use of ethnographic stories and meta-narratives relevant to both the context and the argument. The weaving of the ethnography, linguistic, and sociopolitical facets create an interesting and layered argument throughout the book.
2016
Rarely does a title capture the spirit of a book as eloquently as here: Alexander Maxwell has produced an intelligent, irreverent, idiosyncratic, and in his own words ironic narrative about the birth and ultimate success of Slovak nationalism, defined as the belief in a "Slovak nation" speaking a "Slovak language." His argument is interesting throughout, despite some inaccuracies and slips that could easily have been addressed within the author's own framework of interpretation. Maxwell places himself firmly within modernization theory's "peasants into patriots" framework. But rather than studying why this transformation happened, he takes the process of nationalization for granted and focuses on the many different conceptualizations of "the nation" circulating in the nineteenth and early twentieth century among the Slavic speaking elites of what is today Slovakia. Instead of linearity and teleology, Maxwell highlights contingency and failure in order to argue that "the historical forces that caused Slovak particularist nationalism were unintended consequences of other nationalist movements" (185). The author approaches his sources with considerable sophistication, taking the discourses and wording of his actors deeply seriously as testimonies to their world views and horizons of expectation-ideas and schemes that are often at odds with contemporary categories, or with how things turned out. When Ľudovít Štúr in 1843 in a pamphlet justifying the new orthography he had just designed called Slovak a "dialect" (nárečja) and Slovaks a "tribe" (kmen), Maxwell insists that these words were not chosen randomly and asks why Štúr used them, rather than simply presuming-as scholars have been prone to do-that what Štúr "really meant" was that the Slovaks formed a separate "nation" with its own "language." Such careful philological hermeneutics gives his reasoning considerable authority. Maxwell also seeks to sharpen our tools for analyzing arguments about language and nationality by developing a terminology capable of singling out the different brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Bohemia-Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder
Forum Historiae, 2022
The study outlines the opinions on and sources of the so-called Slovak question in the interwar Czechoslovak republic amongst the writings of three Slovak literary critics: Stanislav Mečiar, Andrej Kostolný and Michal Chorváth. Each author stood for a different contemporary ideology; nationalist/autonomist, Czechoslovakist and communist, respectively. The current article details the ways and reasons these critics legitimised national self-determination, whether by invoking the legacy of the national awakening and those stereotypical historical narratives of Slovak oppression, equality and fulfilment within a common Czechoslovak state, or through the idea of social revolution and stark opposition to tradition deriving from modernist distrust and a general fragmentation of the world and society. Opinions on the problem with the Slovakness of national literature are also illustrated, as well as its place within the context of world literature, including an analysis of how these ideological rivals shared certain attitudes towards the national self-determination of Slovaks, yet differed greatly in their ideas on its manifestation. On the one hand, cooperation among literary intelligentsia may be seen as an effort to remain internally united while facing an impending world war; on the other hand, it could be interpreted as another part of the ideological struggle, as the case of the famous Congress of Slovak Writers seems to demonstrate.
Beware of the dog! Private linguistic landscapes in two ‘Hungarian’ villages in South-West Slovakia
Language Policy, 2015
This study demonstrates how a single type of sign can be connected to language policy on a larger scale. Focusing on the relationship between language policy and language ideologies, I investigate the private Linguistic Landscape (LL) of Hungarians living in two villages in Slovakia. Through an examination of 'beware of the dog' signs, it is shown how such signs can be indicative of different language policies. In Slovakia, the Hungarian public LL is often referred to as a threat to the state language and public order. This ideology is reflected on the LL so that there are mostly Slovak-only public signs in bilingual and Hungarian dominant villages. The private realm is the only significant area where a certain Hungarian dominance is present. In a bilingual village, Hungarians prefer Slovak in their public signage, while in a village with Hungarian majority people invest on having private Hungarian signs by purchasing them in Hungary as well as through hand-making signs. The counter-normativity of having monolingual Hungarian signs is underlined by several factors. First, the language policy referred to as laws have put an emphasis on warning signs. Secondly, a Hungarian language rights leaflet has elevated 'beware of the dog' signs as normatively bilingual. Thirdly, the context of Slovakia, engaged in nation building disfavors the public use of Hungarian. This paper illustrates the importance of considering ideologies as reflected in private LL in multilingual contexts in transition.
2015
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Voros L - Social Representations of Slovaks in the Magyar Press_1914-18_(HC 2008-5).pdf
Historický časopis, 2008
In this study the author analyses the changes of social representations of the Slovak speaking population of the north-western part of the Hungarian Kingdom in the regional Magyar press during the years of the Great War. The article is based on analyses of five Magyar regional newspapers (issued in mainly Slovak inhabited areas), in which the author explores the usage of various categories (such as “people/folk”, “nationality”, “nation”, as well as notions of “loyalty”, “treacherousness”, and “Pan-Slavism”) and stereotypes as they were utilized in the representations of the Slovaks. The analyses follows how the seemingly subtle changes within the predominant Hungarian/Magyar nationalist ideology of the “Hungarian (political) nation” and particular events in the domestic policy and abroad (the policy of limited cooperation with the leaders of of the non/Hungarian nationalist movements pursued by the prime minister I. Tisza on the eve of the World War, and the activities of Czech and Slovak politicians in exile, and of the Czech members of parliament in the Vienna Reichsrat during the last two years of the war) influenced and in fact changed the social representations of the Slovak population within the period Hungarian/Magyar discourse. Keywords: Social representations. Hungarian/Magyar and Slovak nationalism. Nationalist discourses, Social categories of nation, nationality and people` World War I, 1914 –1918.
The Enlightenment and Beginnings of the Modern Slovak Nation
The national movement, by which the modern Slovak nation was formed, was a process of seeking and defining the national identity through which the non-dominant ethnic group shed its linguistic, cultural, political and social inferiority. 1 In Slovak historiography, the concept of "national renascence/awakening" is normally used to describe this process even if, from the viewpoint of the theory of national movements, it is not fully adequate. These terms presuppose, namely, the existence of an entity of subject which, for a certain period of time, lost its identity or fundamental characteristics. It was the task of one or two generations of national "revivers" to bring it once again to life. 2 At first glance, the situation in which the Slovaks found themselves as an ethnic group at the dawn of the modern era did not provide evidence that they might have unique attributes defined in the past --a common language, a collective memory of a common shared history or a territory institutionally anchored. The Slovak ethnic group was not so much expressed in a distinctly social membership, since they belonged to an ethnic group with an incomplete social structure, but rather by confessional diversity. During the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century allegiance to one of two distinct and, in the past, antagonistic confessions, the Evangelical and the Catholic was a decisive factor from upon which depended the cultivated form of the language used, 3 the typical traditions which were fostered and way in which concepts of cultural orientation were articulated. The elements of a common consciousness, which in the case of the majority of the developed national collectives were a decisive bond, 4 had in the case of the Slovaks a different quality: the evangelical intelligentsia clung to the Czech literary language in public, in writing and in their liturgy and they
Nation and language: Magyar and Slovak ideas of common good (The first half of the 19th century)
Ethics & Bioethics
The author studies the Magyar and Slovak ideas of common good that concerned the inhabitants of Hungary in the first half of the 19th century. The Magyar model was based on the rights of an individual, their civic duties, and virtues. Its realisation, however, lay in preferring the interests of the Magyar nation and required the adoption of full Magyar national identity, i.e. assimilation and ethnocide of the non-Magyar inhabitants of Hungary. The author characterises this model as exclusive, chauvinist, and nationalist-Messianic, masquerading as liberal values. On the other hand, the Slovak model of common good was based on the presumption of equal rights and duties for all citizens of Hungary while preserving the possibility of the growth, development, and cultivation of each individual, including the opportunity to gain education in one’s own mother tongue. The author perceives the Slovak model as inclusive, pluralist, and humanist; he considers it as a better alternative for the...
Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language and Accidental Nationalism.
2009
The official blurb: At the turn of the nineteenth century, Hungary was the site of a national awakening. While Hungarian-speaking Hungarians sought to assimilate Hungary's ethnic minorities into a new idea of nationhood, the country's Slavs instead imagined a proud multi-ethnic and multi-lingual state whose citizens could freely use their native languages. The Slavs saw themselves as Hungarian citizens speaking Pan-Slav and Czech dialects - and yet were the origins of what would become in the twentieth century a new Slovak nation. How then did Slovak nationalism emerge from multi-ethnic Hungarian loyalism, Czechoslovakism and Pan-Slavism? Here Alexander Maxwell presents the story of how and why Slovakia came to be.