The Newspaper Student and the Journal Praxis: Student and Academic Periodical Press in Pursuit of University Autonomy and the Freedom of (Literary) Criticism 1968−1974

Abstract

The paper explores the links between the newspaper Student, a youth periodical of unprecedented relevance both in the interwar and post-war Yugoslavia, and of overall maximum longevity, on the one hand, and a philosophical journal Praxis, on the other between 1968 and 1974. Admittedly, in 1968, the newspaper Student was censored for the first time, while the journal Praxis was definitively defunded in 1974. The research consists of four parts. The first part outlines introductory considerations about the Student’s pre-WWII history and the context (censorship and political repression against independent intellectuals and the student movement) in which Praxis emerged. Furthermore, both Student and Praxis’s editorial boards joined forces to publish the first collection of documents about the reemergence of the student movement at the University of Belgrade following the student demonstrations in June 1968. Additionally, the second part describes how the Praxis’ return to early Marx, under the motto of the ruthless criticism of everything existing, influenced the intellectual climate in which student press could practice and promote the paradigm of literary criticism, which was directly opposed to the state-sponsored concept of socialist realism. The third part examines the hypothesis that university professors gathered around the Praxis journal and the student movement all together constituted the university public sphere, which revitalized the struggle for university autonomy, one of the fundamental demands in the pre-war student movement. What is more, the circumstances regarding the university public sphere were fertile ground for the semantic autonomy of text to be articulated as a form of an anti-bureaucratic editorial policy of the student press. In conclusion, the paper elaborates on how the pursuit of university autonomy and the freedom of expression revealed what usually remains hidden when it comes to the concept of semantic autonomy of the text – its historiscity and historical development in the Yugoslav context.