Slovenska Literatura (Dec 2018)
Stereotypes and Images of the Others as Part of Travel Literature: Exemplified on Travelogues about Montenegro by Jozef Holúbek (1883 – 1956)
Abstract
The goal of the paper is to identify the stereotypes and images of the others in travelogues written by little-known Slovak Vojvodina writer Jozef Holúbek (1883 – 1956), to help to research the genre as well as to extend the knowledge of his life and work. The concept of stereotype is currently a subject of interdisciplinary research, and therefore producing a unifying definition of it is quite a challenging task. On the one hand, stereotype does not have an exclusively negative meaning and is defined as an important cognitive function, on the other hand, it is explained as a bait for generalisations, a predictible way of writing (talking) about the others, in the postcolonial conceptions also as a tool of power and supremacy. The research of stereotypes and ideas about other nations also includes travel literature. The paper focuses on analysis of the stereotypes and ideas about the history, culture and tradition of Montenegro in the early 20th century in the travelogues by J. Holúbek titled Cesta na Čiernu Horu/Journey to Montenegro (1902) and Na Čiernej Hore/In Montenegro (1903). The stereotypes and ideas of the others are analysed there with the help of Zoran Konstantinović´s findings saying that the image of the other, different and strange inevitably presents the image of the person searching for the other, different and strange. The other methodological impulses include the genre transition from the margin to the centre of attention of literary scientific research, interdisciplinary propositions of imagology, postcolonial studies and reception of the genre in the Slovak context. Travelogue is seen as a hybrid genre form of fluctuating borders which changes under the influence of dominant elements in individual texts, which also affects the function of the text. J. Holúbek´s travelogues feature this hybrid nature in terms of genre and diversity in terms of style, they interconnect esthetical and exploratory functions of travelogue narration. The writer´s approach to stereotypes, his broad educational, cultural background as well as the writings themselves reveal him anew as a noteworthy figure of Slovak-language Lowland literature.
