In the turbulent year 1968, the student movements in the West sought ideological inspiration in Marxist theory in order to establish an ambivalent relationship to structuralism. With the intertwining of structuralist and Marxist ideas, the revolution has transferred from the street to the text and consequently to literature (and vice versa). With the new media and the relaxation of political repression in the socialist countries and the accelerated opening to the West in the 1960s, the situation in the West was transferred to the local student movements on the European cultural periphery in various ways. In my master's thesis, I am interested in how the student movements in Slovenia and Czechoslovakia shaped their attitude towards contemporary Western (especially French) literary and theoretical production and how this relationship between theory, literature and activism was established in the respective local situations. I will examine this through by comparing the two leading student newspapers of the time, Tribuna (Slovenia) and Student (Czechoslovakia), which in 1968 actively intervened in general political and cultural events beyond the scope of student magazines and established themselves in their countries as two of the most important socially critical newspapers of the time. In comparison, we find similarities between the two newspapers – literary and theoretical publications in both newspapers were often politically motivated – and divergences – Student did not occupy a central position, unlike Tribuna as a newspaper publishing neo-avant-garde literature and contemporary theory.
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