Towards Integral Science of Literature and, Further, Towards Cultural Studies (Institute of Literature and Art, Belgrade)

Abstract

The Institute for Literature and Art is a central Serbian scholarly institution dedicated to researching the widest range of issues in the field of history and theory of literature, folklore and comparative studies, but also to interdisciplinary work that connects the science of literature with other disciplines, from art history to cultural studies. The research is organized within several departments focused on different branches of literary science, such as theory and comparative studies (Theory of Literature and Art, Comparative Studies of Serbian Literature), or on specific theoretical questions and issues of literary/ cultural history, which couldn’t be approached in a sufficiently systematic way in other types of institutions, such as faculties (Periodicals in the History of Serbian Literature and Culture, History of Serbian Literary Criticism and Metacriticism, Serbian Literature and Cultural Self-Awareness, Poetics of Modern and Contemporary Serbian Literature). Also, one department is dedicated to theoretically and methodologically modern studies of oral tradition, as distinctive Serbian cultural heritage, and to the recording of current oral creative processes (Folklore Studies). Over the course of almost six decades, the Institute has given rise to a number of important scholars and established links with similar research institutions, as well as comparative and Slavic departments at a number of prestigious foreign universities. The results of previousresearches have been presented in various publications of the Institute,primarily monographs and collections of papers, among whose authors aresome of today’s most famous academic names. In addition to a large numberof such studies – dedicated to individual writers, literary movements, semantic, stylistic and other analyzes, or specific literary and cultural phenomena –the work of the Institute stands behind scholarly editions of various texts and of the Dictionary of Literary Terms, a fundamental lexicographic publication in the field of literature studies. The Dictionary had two editions (1986, 1992) and remained the only endeavor of its kind in the former Yugoslavia. Also, the Institute is the publisher of the magazine Književna istorija (Literary History), listed on ERIH PLUS and on the list of the International Committee of Slavists.Today, the Institute has about forty associates, who are believed to continue its traditions in a way worthy of its predecessors.