Književni
opus Daše Drndić pripada zasebnom kanonu književnih tekstova koji autorica sama
afirmira svojim pisanjem u potrazi za
vlastitom interpretativnom zajednicom odmaknutom od kanona kojim ...vladaju hijerarhije utemeljene na nacionalnim i
ideološkim kategorijama. Njezin se kanon oblikuje iz
autobiografske diskurzivne pozicije, odnosno iz pozicije autorice koja
centripetalno „uvlači“ u svoj narativni prostor pripovjedačke glasove drugih autora/ica, najčešće onih koji su pisali o
Holokaustu ili su bili žrtve Holokausta. Nadopisujući svoj tekst na njihovo
svjedočenje ili traumu, ona stvara polifonijske prozne kompozicije u kojima se, pored autorice Daše Drndić,
koja istodobno postaje i objekt reprezentiranja i subjekt posredovanja,
pripovijedanju priključuju Danilo Kiš, Bruno Schulz, Aharon Appelfeld, Paul
Celan, Primo Levi, Wisława Szymborska, Witold Gombrowicz, Walter Benjamin i
drugi. Tretirajući biografije autora/ica i njihove književne tekstove kao
podjednako (ne)pouzdane dokumente, izabrani se autori/ice njezinom tekstu priključuju
ponekad posredstvom svojih književnih tekstova, a ponekad izravno, kao
sudionici naracije. U radu se analiziraju tri postupka u funkciji oblikovanja zasebnog kanona
književnih tekstova: postupak fikcionalizacije biografija autora, postupak multipliciranja implicitnih autora i postupak
fikcionalizacije autobiografskog subjekta. Dok se fikcionalizacijom autora kao
stvarnih povijesnih osoba, multipliciraju književni likovi, multipliciranjem
implicitnih autora, osnažuje se i podupire autobiografska pozicija pripovjednog subjekta, da bi se postupkom
fikcionalizacije autobiografskog subjekta, oslabila prethodno stečena autorska
pripovjedačka pozicija.
Daša Drndić’s literary oeuvre belongs to a separate canon of literary texts that the authoress herself affirms with her writing in search of her own interpretative community away from the canon ruled by hierarchies based on national and ideological categories. Her canon is shaped from an autobiographical discursive position, that is, from the perspective of an authoress who “draws” into her narrative space the voices of other authors and authoresses, most frequently those who wrote about the Holocaust or were victims of the Holocaust. In her writing, she conveys someone else’s testimony or trauma and creates polyphonic prose compositions in which the authoress at the same time becomes the object of representation and the subject of mediation. So, the authoress’s narration is joined by other narrators – Danilo Kiš, Bruno Schulz, Aharon Appelfeld, Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Wisława Szymborska, Witold Gombrowicz, Walter Benjamin and others. By treating the authors’ biographies and their literary texts as equally (un)reliable documents, the selected authors are sometimes joined to her text through their literary texts and sometimes directly as participants in the narrative. The paper analyses three procedures in the function of shaping a separate canon of literary texts: the procedure of fictionalizing authors’ biographies, the procedure for multiplying the implied authors, and the procedure of fictionalizing an autobiographical subject. While by fictionalizing the authors as real historical figures literary characters are multiplied, by multiplying the implied authors the autobiographical position of the narrative subject is strengthened and supported, but in order to weaken the previously acquired authorial narrative position through the process of fictionalizing the autobiographical subject.
Although the chronotropic approach to the novels of exile is almost self-explanatory, specific features in post-Yugoslav exile narrations evoke a separate chronotype interpretation. First of all, ...post-Yugoslav literature is additionally loaded with an identity burden because the abandoned areas of the 1990s for the exiled writer do not disappear at a metaphorical level, by turning into a mnemotope, but in the actual breakup of the political entity. Instead, the imaginary supranational heritage transforms into a kind of counterculture, mostly affirmed by exile writers. Therefore, returning to the abandoned area often becomes possible only as a return to the past. Tis paper will follow the literary theme of exile comparatively. It will start from the reflective nostalgia in the prose of Dubravka Ugrešić (the Ministry of Pain), through global exile which mirrors the history of the relationship between European persecutions and America as an unfair homeland which destroys all identity countenance in the novels of Aleksandar Hemon (Nowhere Man; The Lazarus Project). Tis theme will then proceed to the intra-Yugoslav “inherited” exile in the novels of Goran Vojnović (Chefurs Raus!; Jugoslavija, moja dežela Yugoslavia, My Homeland), which, like a curse of the genus, fathers left to their sons. In the texts mentioned above, the chronotype of exile is dealt with at the level of genre, as the major, supreme chronotype that includes or opens space to a series of specific local chronotypes, which are fundamental to exile narration. We also encounter these motifs in other genres, but in exile narration they are a pillar of the genre. They are, by nature, chronotropic because they are realized through the binary spatial-temporal categories of presence and absence, affiliation and non-affiliation, anchoring and nomadism. In this paper, I will look at three such chronotype motifs: 1) the motif of a home as a non-place or a place of absence; 2) the motif of the other/mirror country and the other/ “mirror” history; 3) the motif of return and travel (by train), which regularly invokes the stereotypical representation of a place and the past.
Beginning with the concept of "nesting orientalism" introduced by Milica Bakić-Hayden in the sense of patterns of representation used to describe the Other by all ethnic groups in former Yugoslavia, ...this paper examines four views of "nesting balkanism" in post-Yugoslav literature. First, there is a chronotopic view from the post-Yugoslav exile back to the past, in which the Balkans function as a contextual synonym for the "former homeland," always used in a context of "war," "violence," "primitivism," "disorder" and "cruelty". The second view refers to several Slovenian authors, starting with Slavoj Žižek, Aleš Debeljak and the young novelist Goran Vojnović, who show specific balkanistic representation connected with sevdah and turbofolk music. The third view is connected with travelling and trains, as a frequent topic of orientalistic representation inherited from the Orient Express novels. Finally, the fourth view draws on examples from Dubravka Ugrešić’s descriptions of her "fellow-countrymen." Almost all analyzed examples show that using the name Balkan in post-Yugoslav literature is connected with the "logic of displaced racism," a practice regarded by Žižek as a kind of inverted racism which is allowed when comparing "tolerant" Europe to Balkan Otherness.
Since the (re)structuring collective memory always implies particular political processes, in the case of Ivan Goran Kovačić and his narrative poem The Pit (Jama), the fundamental text of the ...Partisan canon of Croatian literature, it may be divided into two periods with a transitional watershed of the 90s (or the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) as a historical turning point. Post-Yugoslav revisionist processes of the memory of World War II, which then started, inevitably had to influence the “myth about Goran”, up to that time in the conventional memory constructed around three key points. The first was his leaving Zagreb, together with Vladimir Nazor, to join the Partisans; the second was the revelation of Ustasha crimes in the epic poem The Pit and third his death by a “chetnikʼs knife”, which he prophetically hinted at in his poem “My Tomb”. Furthermore, the critical reception of The Pit from its first edition takes place on two plans of expression – artistic (fine arts) and literary. These “two lives” of one epic poem had different destinies and also attached to themselves different memories including forgetting strategies of (re)structuring collective memory.
Although the chronotopic approach to the novels of exile is almost self-explanatory, certain specifics expressed by post-Yugoslav exile narrations evoke a separate chronotope interpretation. First ...and foremost, post-Yugoslav literature is additionally encumbered with the identity issue because the abandoned areas of the nineties for the exiled writer do not disappear at a metaphorical level, by turning into a mnemotope, but in the actual break-up of the political entity, the imaginary supranational heritage transforms itself into a kind of counterculture, mostly affirmed by exile writers. Therefore, returning to the abandoned place often becomes possible only as a return to the past. In this paper, the literary theme of exile will be followed comparatively, starting from the reflective nostalgia in the prose of Dubravka Ugrešić (The Ministry of Pain), through a global exile which reflects the history of the relationship between European persecutions and America as an unfair homeland, which breaks all identity support in the novels of Aleksandar Hemon (The Nowhere Man; The Lazarus Project), to the intra-Yugoslav, “hereditary” exile in the novels of Goran Vojnović (Chefurs Raus!; Yugoslavia, My Homeland), which fathers left to their sons like a curse of the genus. In the texts mentioned above, the chronotope of exile is dealt with at the level of genre, as the major, supreme chronotope, which includes or opens space to a series of specific local chronotopes, which are fundamental to exile narration. These motifs are also encountered in other genres, but in exile narration they are the bearing pillars of the genre. They are, by their nature, chronotopic because they are realised through the binary spatial-temporal categories of presence and absence, affiliation and non-affiliation, anchoring and nomadism. In this paper, I will look at three such chronotope motifs: 1) the motif ofhome as a non-place or a place of absence; 2) the motif of other/mirror country and other/“mirror” history; 3) the motif of return and travel (by train), which regularly invokes the stereotypical representation of the place and the past.
This paper gives an outline of researches conducted by three authors we found most relevant for description of so-called "active syntactic construction. Since it seems to be universally accepted, we ...start from Dixon's distinguishing split-S and fluid-S patterns as two basic types of the split systems caused by the semantic nature of the verb. Second part of the paper refers to the Johanna Nichol's research into global typology. Starting from the Klimov's observation that certain features cluster together and are associated with certain types, she has tested correlations among clause alignment, morphological marking type, morphologycal complexity and word order, as well as correlations between these and the other categories. On the big sample of the world languages she follows distribution of these language features with an aim to find some statistically significant pattern which could confirm areal or typological correlations between these features. Correlation chain of head-marking morphology, lower complexity and split-S type of alignment, as well as correlation chain of dependent-marking morphology, higher complexity and fluid-S type of alignment, we found the most stimulating foe the subject of this paper, because it confirms basic typological differences among languages with split-S and fluid-S patterns, Third part of the paper presents Marianne Mithun's work., Although everyone emphasizes semantic bases of these syntactic patterns, only Mithun researches rich variety of semantic distinctions underlying different construction. It leads her to detection of two systems: first one which is based primarily on the lexical aspect of the verb she calls "active/stative" or "active" and the other one which is primarily based on the semantic features of the participants (actor and undergoer) she calls "agent/patient" or "agentive". Finally, in the light of presented works, we give an conclusion mostly regarding differences between split-S and fluid-S types of constructions. Although these constructions show certain formal similarities, they are basically different in terms of what they grammaticalize: Dixon's split-S and Mithun's active patterns are motivated by verbal semantics, as it grammaticalizes lexical categories on verbs, whereas Dixon's fluid-S and Mithun's agentive are motivated by nominal semantic, as it codes nominal semantic roles.
This paper deals with the relationship of the wartime literature and the autobiographical discourse in the fictional and non-fictional texts written by two contemporary Croatian authoresses, Alenka ...Mirković and Grozdana Cvitan. From the receptional point of view, when the autobiographical discourse connects with the wartime themes, the importance of the social status of the author is substituted by the socially important topics, and the question of “who has the right to the story of his own life” (Velčić 1991) turns into a question of “what is a socially relevant theme?” Prevalence of topics that are important to collective memory in wartime literature is almost self-explanatory; this kind of topic is selected by Alenka Mirković in her Vukovar war chronicle 97.6 Mhz. Glasom protiv topova. Mala ratna kronika ((11996, 22011). While the novel written by Alenka Mirković meets the reader’s expectations by offering “autobiographical contract” (Ph. Lejeune) in which the name on the cover guarantees the identity of the author and the narrator, in short stories written by Grozdana Cvitan, Psi rata i druge bestije (2007), a war reality becomes awider framework of literary (self)reflection with an absence of documentarity. Although in her war stories there is no classic autobiographical contract (since there is no correspondence between the name of the author and narrator), the character of the narrator who listens leaving the others to become the main protagonists, guarantees an authentic cover for mediation of autobiographical testimony.
In Amélie Nothomb's fiction the semantic complex of food appears frequently, and in two novels it is linked to the characters of gourmet-murderers. In her first novel Hygiène de l'assassin (1992) ...Hygiene and the Assassin it is the writer Prétextat Tach, and then in the subversion of the fairy tale Barbe bleue (2012) Bluebeard it is Don Elemirio Nibal y Milcar. Along with the love of food, the gourmet characters of Amélie Nothomb share a mysterious aristocratic origin, hidden crime, bizarre theories about women, lack of empathy and extravagant life in seclusion. Food in these novels is the dominant motif around which the character is built at the level of discourse (in the characterization of the gourmet character by indirect presentation through speech and appearance), but also at the level of story (at all thematic layers of the novel). Therefore, we will approach the literary characters of gourmets through the analytical model developed by Gajo Peleš in the interpretation of the novel. This means that we start from an assumption that the projection of food discourse on the psychical, societal and ontemic levels is crucial for the networking of narrative figures in the semantic substructure of the novels. Given that in these novels the body appears as a value of the ontological level by which all other ideological particulars– art, love, and faith – are measured, we will include in the interpretation her latest novel Soif (2019) Thirst, which is a kind of manifesto of celebrating corporality through a religious topic. While the first two novels show the characteristics of the Rabelaisian chronotope, the last novel, although it does not have the characteristics of a parodia sacra, also affirms the values of the embodiment of the world. Namely, in this evangelical praise of the body and bodily experience as crucial for the complete realization of the meaning of life, Christ himself speaks in a monologue, accusing his disembodied father of not understanding his embodied offspring. In this sense, this last novel, like the previous two, can be read in the ambit of the novelistic tradition which Bakhtin calls the carnival line of development of the European novel.
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