PhD Jernej Kusterle
PhD Jernej Kusterle (1987), Slovenian linguist, literary theorist, literary historian and book editor, graduated in 2013 with the thesis "Structural Poetics of Street Poetry", in 2016 he obtained his master's degree with the thesis "Theory of Slovenian Street Poetry and its Cultural Context", in 2022 he successfully defended doctoral thesis "The Aesthetics of Ugliness in Poetry of Slovenian Modern Period" and earned scientific title Doctor of Philosophy. From January 2022 to January 2024 he was employed as a book editor at the first Slovenian publishing house Celjska Mohorjeva družba. Currently he is working as a high-school Slovene language and literature teacher at I. gimnazija Celje.
Jernej Kusterle is the Prešeren Students Award winner (2016), the Škrabec Association Scholarship recipient (2019/2020), a member of the Slovenian Comparative Literature Association and a member of the Slovenian Society of Aesthetics. From January 2022 to January 2024 he was a member of the editorial board of "Zvon", the oldest Slovenian magazine for literature, culture and society.
From September 1st 2018 to July 31st 2021 he was working as Foreign Expert Professor (Lecturer for Slovenian language, literature and culture) and the Head of the Slovenian Teaching and Research Section at the School of European Studies at Beijing International Studies University (BISU) in China. He is a founder of the Slovenian Teaching and Research Section (2019) at School of European Languages, Literature and Culture at BISU and the Slovenian Book Section (2019) at Foreign Language Library at BISU.
He was a member of the research working group at the Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU). He did the transformation and redaction in TEI note for e-book "Folk Music of Prlekija" (2016), he was working on a diplomatic transcription of the baroque manuscript of Anton Kadunc "Song-Book of Anton Kadunc" from 1798 (2016–2017), on the project of the digitalization of the manuscripts of Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol (2017), and on the diplomatic transcript of the first book of "Slovenian Folk Poems" from Slovenian linguist and folk poems collector Karel Štrekelj (2021).
His scientific work is divided between researching the system of street poetry on one side and aesthetics of ugliness on the other. His work is published in several international scientific magazines and monographies. He regularly presents his scientific results at various international conferences.
Jernej Kusterle is the Prešeren Students Award winner (2016), the Škrabec Association Scholarship recipient (2019/2020), a member of the Slovenian Comparative Literature Association and a member of the Slovenian Society of Aesthetics. From January 2022 to January 2024 he was a member of the editorial board of "Zvon", the oldest Slovenian magazine for literature, culture and society.
From September 1st 2018 to July 31st 2021 he was working as Foreign Expert Professor (Lecturer for Slovenian language, literature and culture) and the Head of the Slovenian Teaching and Research Section at the School of European Studies at Beijing International Studies University (BISU) in China. He is a founder of the Slovenian Teaching and Research Section (2019) at School of European Languages, Literature and Culture at BISU and the Slovenian Book Section (2019) at Foreign Language Library at BISU.
He was a member of the research working group at the Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU). He did the transformation and redaction in TEI note for e-book "Folk Music of Prlekija" (2016), he was working on a diplomatic transcription of the baroque manuscript of Anton Kadunc "Song-Book of Anton Kadunc" from 1798 (2016–2017), on the project of the digitalization of the manuscripts of Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol (2017), and on the diplomatic transcript of the first book of "Slovenian Folk Poems" from Slovenian linguist and folk poems collector Karel Štrekelj (2021).
His scientific work is divided between researching the system of street poetry on one side and aesthetics of ugliness on the other. His work is published in several international scientific magazines and monographies. He regularly presents his scientific results at various international conferences.
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Papers by PhD Jernej Kusterle
Throughout history, the Church has presented beauty as the essence of both religion and art, be it sacred or secular. Ugliness, on the other hand, was allowed, but not for the purpose of an aesthetic experience; rather, it was a mechanism to warn believers against the Devil, Hell and posthumous punishment due to an immoral life that did not follow God’s commandments and the higher Truth.
Such a purpose of ugliness, equated within Christianity with the demonic, can already be traced in the Slovenian context in the Freising Manuscripts (972–1039), which have a sacral character and are considered the first preserved record of the Slovenian language. Later it reappears in Valvasor’s Scene of Human Death (in three parts) (1682), which is believed to be one of the first Slovenian examples of sacred non-liturgical art with a distinctive educational function.
Both texts present the original sin with which the Devil in the form of a snake first turned man away from God and brought him closer to himself, the death with which God cursed Adam and Eve, and the salvation that only came about through Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection. To this salvation a person is entitled if they follow God’s commandments and the higher Truth, and are ready to confess their earthly sins. Although the two texts are similar, they differ in many ways. While the Monuments do not mention witchcraft, which was still alive in the minds of the people of the Middle Ages, Valvasor’s Scene includes an erotic relationship between the Devil and the witch, which moves the demonic in Slovenian verse texts even more definitely from the metaphysical to the factual level.
After the Baroque, the framework of demonism, including witchcraft, continues to appear in the Slovenian sacred and secular verse texts of the Enlightenment, (Pre)Romanticism and Realism. However, nowhere in the historical cross-section does it reach the level that characterises the period of Modernity (i.e. decadence, symbolism and New Romanticism).
The ‘Modern’ situation was the result of the social changes that took place at the beginning of the 19th century, and as such was the starting point on which Karl Rosenkranz set up the theory of the aesthetics of ugliness. His theory expanded Baumgarten's concept of aesthetics in such a way that he manipulated the aesthetic field and added ugliness to beauty. Then Charles Baudelaire presented the concept of the ‘new beauty’ against the background of the death of God, Nothingness and spleen, which led to the de-tabooing of sensitive content in Christian society and finally initiated a cult of demonic muse worship.
The ‘new beauty’, therefore, in addition to the mysterious and to what had previously been considered insignificant and unworthy, highlights demonism. It characterises both Baudelaire’s ‘The Litany of Satan’, where the speaker enters the realm of Satanism, and the poem ‘Benediction’, where a demonic muse appears. She wants to humiliate and destroy her worshipper with the help of black magic (spiritually, physically), like in Cankar’s ‘aesthetics of decadence’. Cankar’s concept is based on sin as an aesthetic ideal of modern beauty: thus sin has to be deliberate and moderate, or there has to be only a desire to sin, because otherwise it is an object of artistic observation without aesthetic value.
In Cankar, unholiness encompassing demonism and sorcery is most illustratively shown in the Vienna Evenings cycle. Here the speaker in the third poem from the first edition of Erotica (1899) sings of a ‘wonderful sinner’. To her he attributes signs of illness and in an intoxicating dream compares her to Titian’s adulteress. In the fifth poem from the 1902 reprint, he then meets a witch who, with the help of black magic, hides her demonic face at first, but later throws off the mask and shows herself to him in her true form. In the seventh poem of the cycle Helena (1899), Cankar's demonic muse is joined by Mephisto, with whom the speaker is ready to sign a blood contract and spiritually perish in exchange for sensual contact with the muse.
The article highlights the womenʼs issue in the context of street poetry. Examples of both male and female authors (the latter coming from domestic and foreign cultural-linguistic environments) are used to discuss the issue. First, a justification for the term "female street poetry" is presented, followed by definitions of biological and social gender, gender roles, feminism, and masculinism, to which are added representative examples from practice. These are followed by an overview of the history of female street poetry in Slovenia from the supposedly first appearances in the early 1980s (Neca Falk) until the first decade of the 21st century.
that contain death/Death and other »modern« phenomena related to death/Death.
Conference Presentations by PhD Jernej Kusterle
Throughout history, the Church has presented beauty as the essence of both religion and art, be it sacred or secular. Ugliness, on the other hand, was allowed, but not for the purpose of an aesthetic experience; rather, it was a mechanism to warn believers against the Devil, Hell and posthumous punishment due to an immoral life that did not follow God’s commandments and the higher Truth.
Such a purpose of ugliness, equated within Christianity with the demonic, can already be traced in the Slovenian context in the Freising Manuscripts (972–1039), which have a sacral character and are considered the first preserved record of the Slovenian language. Later it reappears in Valvasor’s Scene of Human Death (in three parts) (1682), which is believed to be one of the first Slovenian examples of sacred non-liturgical art with a distinctive educational function.
Both texts present the original sin with which the Devil in the form of a snake first turned man away from God and brought him closer to himself, the death with which God cursed Adam and Eve, and the salvation that only came about through Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection. To this salvation a person is entitled if they follow God’s commandments and the higher Truth, and are ready to confess their earthly sins. Although the two texts are similar, they differ in many ways. While the Monuments do not mention witchcraft, which was still alive in the minds of the people of the Middle Ages, Valvasor’s Scene includes an erotic relationship between the Devil and the witch, which moves the demonic in Slovenian verse texts even more definitely from the metaphysical to the factual level.
After the Baroque, the framework of demonism, including witchcraft, continues to appear in the Slovenian sacred and secular verse texts of the Enlightenment, (Pre)Romanticism and Realism. However, nowhere in the historical cross-section does it reach the level that characterises the period of Modernity (i.e. decadence, symbolism and New Romanticism).
The ‘Modern’ situation was the result of the social changes that took place at the beginning of the 19th century, and as such was the starting point on which Karl Rosenkranz set up the theory of the aesthetics of ugliness. His theory expanded Baumgarten's concept of aesthetics in such a way that he manipulated the aesthetic field and added ugliness to beauty. Then Charles Baudelaire presented the concept of the ‘new beauty’ against the background of the death of God, Nothingness and spleen, which led to the de-tabooing of sensitive content in Christian society and finally initiated a cult of demonic muse worship.
The ‘new beauty’, therefore, in addition to the mysterious and to what had previously been considered insignificant and unworthy, highlights demonism. It characterises both Baudelaire’s ‘The Litany of Satan’, where the speaker enters the realm of Satanism, and the poem ‘Benediction’, where a demonic muse appears. She wants to humiliate and destroy her worshipper with the help of black magic (spiritually, physically), like in Cankar’s ‘aesthetics of decadence’. Cankar’s concept is based on sin as an aesthetic ideal of modern beauty: thus sin has to be deliberate and moderate, or there has to be only a desire to sin, because otherwise it is an object of artistic observation without aesthetic value.
In Cankar, unholiness encompassing demonism and sorcery is most illustratively shown in the Vienna Evenings cycle. Here the speaker in the third poem from the first edition of Erotica (1899) sings of a ‘wonderful sinner’. To her he attributes signs of illness and in an intoxicating dream compares her to Titian’s adulteress. In the fifth poem from the 1902 reprint, he then meets a witch who, with the help of black magic, hides her demonic face at first, but later throws off the mask and shows herself to him in her true form. In the seventh poem of the cycle Helena (1899), Cankar's demonic muse is joined by Mephisto, with whom the speaker is ready to sign a blood contract and spiritually perish in exchange for sensual contact with the muse.
The article highlights the womenʼs issue in the context of street poetry. Examples of both male and female authors (the latter coming from domestic and foreign cultural-linguistic environments) are used to discuss the issue. First, a justification for the term "female street poetry" is presented, followed by definitions of biological and social gender, gender roles, feminism, and masculinism, to which are added representative examples from practice. These are followed by an overview of the history of female street poetry in Slovenia from the supposedly first appearances in the early 1980s (Neca Falk) until the first decade of the 21st century.
that contain death/Death and other »modern« phenomena related to death/Death.