KONSTRUKCIJA I DEKONSTRUKCIJA STEREOTIPA O ŠPANIJI KAO ZEMLJI TOREADORA I SUNCA U TEKSTOVIMA MILOŠA CRNJANSKOG

Abstract

This paper is concentrated on the imagological rethinking of the picture of Spain in the travelogues and newspaper articles of Miloš Crnjanski, with special attention devoted to the construction and deconstruction of the stereotype of Spain as a country of bullfighting and sun. The emphasis is on Crnjanski’s intention in writing the texts to unveil the essence of Spain that stands against his obligation to convey the picture of the current state of Spanish society to a foreign public in order to confirm the stability of Spanish republic. By using the methodological assumptions of image studies, the paper reexamines the phenomena of stereotypes and collective images of characteristic entities of a nation and its role in the context of the research on conceptions of national identity in literature. In the modeling of the image of the Other, affirmation, and also negation and critical view of simplified images of that nation from the perspective of the experience of a direct encounter with the Other, is extremely important. On this basis, the paper researches the basic prejudice against Spain, such as the vision of Spain as a country of corrida, and its rethinking in Crnjanski’s text. The dialogue and interpreting encounter of author’s perception with previous visions is visible in an endeavor to confirm, as well as to deny the stereotype image of Spain in reality. Crnjanski brings out the question of the public of the corrida, differentiating between the intellectuals and the mass, analyses the meaning of the bullfighting throughout the history, and states its artistic aspect. Special attention is given to relations between bullfighting and religion, as well as bullfighting and death. All these aspects are being compared with similar statements of the Spanish Generation ’98, concluding that a similar spiritual atmosphere existed between Miloš Crnjanski and the members of the Spanish generation.