The Methodology of Periodical Studies at the Institute for Literature and Art: The First Fifty Years

Abstract

The paper describes the fifty year-long development of The History of Serbian Literary Periodicals Project founded and carried out at the Institute for Literature and Art. The author has analyzed research methodologies established and applied during the time, continuities and discontinuities in their principles, and their value or anachronism in current studies. The analysis shows that the methodology is inseparable from the organization of research, and depends on practical organizational, personnel, and financial possibilities. In that sense, the paper explains how instead of the History of Serbian Literary Periodical from 1768 to 1968 (later 1941), the research results have been introduced in the edition of the same name, which is not structured chronologically but problematically. The focus of the analysis was on representative methodological texts based on which was possible to reconstruct the methodology development. The first one is a “Study for the History of Serbian literary periodicals” (1973), as a collective manifesto of the founder (A. Petrov) and first collaborators of the Project (Vida Golubović, Dušan Ivanić, Vladimir Jovičić, Vaso Milinčević, Dragiša Vitošević, Jovan Deretić). Together with it, the transcript of the discussion on the study (1973) is for analytical reasons treated as an integral part of the manifesto, as well as the accompanying texts of two collaborators (1973). The second text is a theoretical draft “Toward a history of literary periodicals” (1983) written by later collaborator Đorđije Vuković. The third one is a methodological manifesto of a new generation of researchers, “The digitization of (literary) periodicals and the methodology of its research” (Milan Miljković, Biljana Andonovska, Stanislava Barać, 2011). In this frame, the paper explains some individual efforts (Miodrag Maticki, Vesna Matović, Slobodanka Peković), and concrete results in ever-changing approaches to periodical studies as of the concept of literary history.