Abstract

The paper examines the meanings of representations of Serbia, the Balkans and Europe at the time of encounter between Enlightenment and Romanticist traditions. The analysis starts from the assumption that the emergence of negative representations of South Eastern Europe cannot be discussed without placing it within the broader context of 18th and 19th century philosophy and literature and the consequences of new philosophical and literary ideas. Underlying the substantial change of the previously dominant paradigms that is expressed in the symbolic division into 'West' and "East', there was a factual rather than symbolic division into an industrial and an agricultural Europe, whose boundaries coincided with the reference points of the symbolic distinction. Insisting on the importance of both analytic levels - the 'symbolic' and the 'factual' - the first section of the paper briefly outlines the development of symbolic geography in the context of 'Balkan' studies in the 1990s, as well as the failure of this genre and the constructivist paradigm in Serbian social theory. The second section is devoted to the discourses of conceptualizing broader communities in symbolic, linguistic, imagological, cultural, political, economic etc. terms, focusing on the beginnings of ideological and linguistic unification of South Slavs and their inclusion into the "enlightened Europe". By analyzing Vuk Stefanovia: Karadzix's writings, as well as correspondence, articles and commentaries referring to Vuk's work in the first half of the 19th century, the author takes the perspective of the past in order to identify the reasons for the failure of imagological and constructivist approach today. U ovom tekstu autorka istrazuje znacenja predstava o Srbiji, Balkanu i Evropi u vremenu susreta prosvetiteljske i romanticarske tradicije. Polaziste je u pretpostavci da se o pocecima negativnih predstava o jugoistocnom delu Evrope ne moze govoriti izvan sireg konteksta filozofije i knjizevnosti XVIII i XIX veka i posledica novih filozofskih i knjizevnih ideja. Sustinska pramena do tada vladajucih paradigmi, izrazena simbolickom podelom na 'Zapad'i 'Istok', u osnovi je imala manje simbolicku a vise fakticku podelu na industrijsku i zemljoradnicku Evropu, cije su se granice uglavnom poklapale sa referentnim tockama simbolicke distinkcije. Potencirajuci vaznost obaju nivoa u analizi, 'simbolickog 'i 'faktickog', prvi deo teksta odnosi se na sazeto predstavljanje razvoja simbolicke geografije u kontekstu studija o Balkanu devedesetih godina proslog veka, kao i na neuspeh ovog zanra i konstruktivisticke paradigme u srpskoj drustvenoj teoriji. Drugi deo teksta posvecenje diskursima osmisljavanja vecih zajednica na simbolickim, jezickim, imagoloskim, kulturnim, politickim, ekonomskim i dr. osnovama, sa fokusom na pocetke idejnog i jezickog ujedinjenja Juznih Slavena, kao i njihovog ukljucenja u prosvecenu Evropu. Analizom tekstova Vuka Stefanovica Karadzica, kao i prepiskama, clancima i komentarima koji su se odnosili na Vukov rad u prvoj polovini XIX veka, autorka iz perspektive proslosti pokusava da ukaze na razloge neuspeha imagoloskog i konstruktivistickog pristupa u savremenosti.