WHAT, HOW AND MAYBE WHY THEY WROTE SO ABOUT EMIGRATION AND EMIGRANTS FROM VENETIAN SLOVENIA IN THE NEWSPAPER MATAJUR IN THE YEARS 1951-1960

Abstract

My attempt was to demonstrate in the contribution what significance a group of the “advanced” gathered around for years long only newspaper of Julian Slovenes, the Matajur attributed to emigration – a “number one” phenomena in decades after World War II in Julian Slovenia. (Julian Slovenia, a region in the northeast of Italy is the most Western part of “Slovene-speaking” territory; its several-centuries political-administrative isolation from other “Slovene-speaking” regions demonstrates in particular identity and culture of its inhabitants). When analysing newspaper contributions from the appearance of the newspaper in October 1950 until the end of 1960, I was looking for contents, which occur on the following three dimensions of communication: selection of the reported reality, attitude of the information towards reality, and linguistic presentation of the information. I named contents that occurred in all three stated fields, motives. I defined motives as a “message/report cliché”, which has in presenting certain content, problematic, a specific attitude towards reality and a specific linguistic presentation of the information. Motives are thus carriers of particular manners of representations of (individual) events, occurrences, phenomena.

With the occurrence, existence of motives I have shown that particular styles of representation of phenomena exist, in the dealt case emigration, and that those form the special meaning of a phenomena (emigration). The existence of motives indicates that emigration was not at all dealt with impartially. The language of power (and resistance), exploitation, discrimination, social inequality and much else interfered in the presentation of this social phenomena. Emigration was in the mentioned period a metaphor for exploitation, inequality; it reflected a subordinate, neglected position of Venetian Slovenes and was as such by the writers of the treated texts evaluated most negatively. Towards the end of the mentioned period a motif of the emigrant occurred, inspired by the “revolutionary iconography”, the worker as carrier of long anticipated change and new era. Emigration thus gained from the side of text writers a new no longer “pessimistic” but “redemptive” significance.

I conclude the article ambitiously: with a presumption that (proof on) existence of motives can enable good foundations for deliberation and theorization on social structures and on functioning in (journalistic) communication that is “writing”. To the reproach why I answer given questions with questions, I say: Why not?