Peripheral Modernism and the World-System: Slovenian Literature and Theory of the Nineteen-Sixties

In response to recent pluralization of modernism, the author adopts Jameson’s singular modernity to argue that, in the capitalist world-system divided between hegemonic and dependent literary fields, modernism exists only through its particular manifestations. During the 1968 student revolt, Slovenian late modernism – in-between peripheral phenomenon caught in the Cold War antagonism – displays a universal feature of the period: its transformative impulse resulting from “the imaginative proximity of social revolution” (Anderson). Embedded in the global insurgency, Slovenian innovative trends of the 1960s synchronized with western centers of modernity. It brought together critical theory and experimental artistic practice to reshape writing, literary institution, the subject, and society at large.