At the Borders between Islam and Christianity: A Modern Reading on an Identity Cycle in Albanian Literature

Abstract

Albanian literature, as randomly happens with the literature of small countries, can be defined closely related to the internal cultural processes of identity cultivation. The Albanian case, moreover, relates the specific nature of this literature, as the border literature between the two main religious, cultural and political entities: Christianity and Islam. There have continually been identity crashes and identity reformatting processes, yet building a core of incomparable identity with no other European country where every similar conglomerate is unimaginable. We have tried to explore the nature of this platform as a cyclical process over time through its appearances in the texts of Ismail Kadare (The Bringer of Misfortune) and Ben Blush (Living on an Island), based on a hybrid reading model Eco (Umberto ) - Fish (Stanley), through The Possible Reader, as a kind of structuralist and phenomenological compromise. The discovery of the syntony/asyntony relationship of the structural meaning of texts with a Dominant Meaning Matrix in today's Albanian literature helps to understand the poetic contours produced by one of the most important integrals influencing the respective literature, that of Identity which has conditioned the Albanian literature, as much as being itself its aftereffect, under the conditions of an exceptionally institutional role of literature relatively unknown in the Balkan and European cultural context.