Nostalgia, we are told, is in the business of idealizing the past. Because nostalgia is routinely associated with the falsification and distortion of memory, any discussion about its role in ...Holocaust representation is fraught with ethical concerns. What purpose can nostalgic sentimentality serve in evoking the reality of the genocide? This essay argues that nostalgia's power to falsify, distort, and sentimentalize the past can be productively and self-consciously mobilized to explore the mechanisms of both remembrance and suppression of memory. As I demonstrate through the readings of Danilo Kiš'sFamily Circusand Christa Wolf'sPatterns of Childhood, because nostalgia raises questions about the possibility of recovering the past, about the dynamics of projection and recuperation, and about the continuity of the self, fictional texts stage nostalgic homecomings precisely in order to confront the realities of both Jewish persecution and Nazification. Nostalgia, in other words, serves not only as mechanism for working through traumatic memories, but as a catalyst for a critical examination of the past.
Wachtel asserts that one way to prove that a Yugoslav literature must have existed is to show that a transnational post-Yugoslav literature actually does exist at present. The existence of such a ...post-Yugoslav literature should be powerful inductive evidence that in the comparatively palmy days of Yugoslavia a supranational Yugoslav literature must have existed as well.
Boym discusses an extreme case in which reading for the conspiratorial plot presents an ethical problem, and the conflation of life and fiction turns deadly. The "secret" book, "The Protocols of the ...Elders of Zion," was one of the most influential forgeries of the twentieth century. She looks at the making of this book, as well as Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" and Danilo Kis's "The Book of Kings and Fools," two recent works that engage with conspiracy theories.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
This article discusses the structural role of legendary paradigms in three of the stories in Danilo Kiš's collection "A Tomb for Boris Davidovich." In 'The Mechanical Lions' legend is conceived as a ...tool of the implied prosecutor, who opposes the arguments of the protagonists' free will to those of preordination. In 'Dogs and Books' and 'A Tomb for Boris Davidovich' legend changes its role and the myth of cyclical time is invoked as an explanatory tool, connecting diverse historical persecutions into a single, determinist vision of history. However, the narrator subverts this pessimistic myth as make-believe, a mere consequence of the transformative device which is used to enhance it.
Writers belonging to cultures once subordinated to the Austrian Empire display a dual attitude towards the Centre: both rejection and nostalgia. These circumstances are translated into a multitude of ...cultural, behavioural, psychological and psycholiterary features, as well as a wide range of literary procedures. Sorin Titel, Milo Crnjanskias well as Danilo Ki, Herta Müller and othersare writers who lived the moment of the disintegration of the Empire, with everything that this meant for the European literature, in general, and for the literature of the Banat region, in particular. This study examines how such writers analyse the history of the nations they belong to and the local perception of the Centre (administration, religion, political leaders) while exploring how they approach themes such as exile, migration, and the trauma of being separated from the place of birth. Moreover, it highlights the aesthetic dimensions of the literature from Banat and the presence of the Danube as a natural link associated with the Central-European space, together with other relevant hydronyms and toponyms.
This article deals with the ideas of Central Europe in the writings of two Yugoslav and Serbian writers Danilo Kiš (1935–1989) and Aleksandar Tišma (1924–2003). Central Europe is, in metaphorical ...terms, a transitional, central region, an area of passage that is filled with opposites. It is demonstrated that in Kiš’s
Hourglass
and Tišma’s
The Book of Blam
(both novels were published in 1972), the region forms a complex literary image of the world of dispersal and disintegration, both in terms of form and content. On the one hand, views of these two writers can be summarized in a well-known and tragic fact that in Central Europe, the heart of Europe, there is also the heart of European darkness symbolized in the Central-European village of Auschwitz. On the other hand, Kiš’s and Tišma’s poetics undoubtedly belong to the geographical and cultural space of a literary Central Europe (marked by Kafka, Musil, Broch). This paper will try to explain how this ambivalent position works as a complex and rich foundation of their fictional work.
Danilo Kiš carried out an inquiring maneuver for the absolute form in which the written has the ability to override and/or delete time and space. It is the result of his desire for compression or ...de/constructive effort to transform a novelistic tissue into an encyclopedic register. His literary work is aimed at integration of the obverse and reverse of fate in duration and disappearance. Through the exposure and semantic para-semantic levels of human understanding of the factual and fictional, through questioning face and reverse the history of the world, The Encyclopedia of the Dead suggests a smoldering in religions and philosophical systems, whose central issue is always in a vacuum between death and love. The Encyclopedia of the Dead offers the key to figuring out the ideal of the writer's poetics, though, in his words, its ideal is never achieved.
The author's point of departure is the observation that both Andrić and Kiš use historical documents in the process of their writing, although they achieve that in different ways. This difference is ...examined in the context of a monumental challenge to which both authors had to respond, i.e., the dominance of information over the story. The poetological reaction to this challenge is different for each author, but a certain position is common to both of them: they both differentiate between the officially accepted history, which they equate with fiction, and non-accepted knowledge about the past. They believe that literature has the power to gather elements of this non-accepted knowledge about the past and confront the official history with them.
The paper focuses on the different narrative techniques used to approach historical subject-matter (the Russia of the 1920s and 1930s) in the collection of stories A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by ...Danilo Kis (1978), the novel The Old Man, written just a year later by Yury Trifonov, and the novel When Making an Omelette, written in 2014 by Lado Kralj. Its starting point is Danilo Kis, who - in all of his works - thematises the seamless merging of fiction and truth. Emphasising the elusive relation between them, he makes abundant use of (pseudo)documentary sources which intertwine real and fictional characters, names, events and testimonies, thus ultimately blurring the line between these two spheres if there ever had been one. On the basis of his autopoetics as laid down in The Anatomy Lesson, his answer to the polemics following the publication of the Tomb, the paper proceeds to the other two novels, which also 'support' their fiction with documentary sources but share, in contrast to Kis, a more traceable biographical element, since both represent a kind of roman à clef. The differences in their approach (Trifonov bases his narration on fragments of memory which inevitably reveal their Rashomonic aspects, Kralj undermines the narrative course of the Bildungsroman by supernatural and fantastic elements) arouse questions about the so called 'objective reality': can we ever detect how things 'really were'? Or do they exist as such - again, just as in Kis - only in the literary work, so that the historical truth (or should we say: historical justice?) can only be achieved through literary mystification?