By engaging the debates on feminist postclassical narratology and by approaching literary representations of girls as one of the sites of the production of girlhood, understoodas a category ...independent of concrete discursive articulations and not as a reflection ofa stable biological or social category, this paper focuses on the analysis of Josip Barković’s Alma and aims to contribute to discussions on the relationship between genderand narration. Specifically, it argues that gender must not be considered in isolationor, in other words, that ignoring the broader socio-cultural context while discussingnovels about Yugoslav girls would mean ignoring the significance of Yugoslav socialismand attributing a feminist impulse to Barković’s novel. A brief discussion of the theoretical and socio-cultural context allows for the analysis of Barković’s novel focused onthe narrative fashioning of girlhood and the figure of the girl in order to show that aconsideration of the context of the novel and its further existence in the cultural fieldprovides a twofold advantage. On the one hand, it broadens the understanding of theactual cultural representations of the figure of youth with their incredibly importantrole in the Yugoslav socialist society while taking into account the category of gender.On the other hand, it expands the understanding of the socio-cultural context in whichthat figure is produced.
In this paper, János Sziveri’s poetry is studied from the perspective of associative plays based on matter-grouping and landscape visions. There was a productive correspondence, as the poet himself ...underlined it, between him and Vasko Popa’s works. The consonance between the book plans and the cycles of poems by Vasko Popa dedicated to the decom- position and recomposition of different matters and remains and the series of Sziveri’s texts are secured by the stock of biological limitations and tactile sensations. The processes of focusing on different bodies and moving from body to body and the excess of neuro- transmission as well as the desire for gratification are most efficiently distributed by the singular or plural first person. The Vasko Popa-esque radiation of life conditions extending beyond instrumentalized functioning and existence based on imitation echoes in Sziveri’s landscape descriptions by intensifying the creative potential of fixed stance and mobility. The antipoetics and the cyclical planning of the texts of the Serbian author with some Ro- manian ancestors in his family tree were properly cultivated and elevated by his Hungarian- speaking companion. Francis Ponge’s art can be considered as their literary precursor. Almost anything that can be told about water, fauna, flora, and the natural cycle, about the sea, shells, snails, pebbles, bones, and oranges, is told in Le parti pris des choses (1942), Ponge’s prose-poem cycle, which prevailed in the works of the well-informed Vasko Popa and, through Popa, in Sziveri’s texts as well. Sziveri’s criticism of targeting the patterns of social viability of South-Eastern Euro- pean repressive practices and collective false consciousness drowning in platitudes is ac- companied by topographic scenery and ethnic diversity which accumulated landscape sur- faces, fragments, and neighbourhoods framed by the Danube, Tisza, and Bega rivers as the scenes of geospecific identity. Comparing existential calculations, describing the shrinking of an ill body – these can be considered as a perceptual Pannonism of a subject observing and recording its direct impressions precisely and accurately. Clinging onto the love of life, self-defence supplied by background knowledge about the countryside – as if all these were representing the escapist way of hiding, disguise, and diversion. Being doomed to live as an outcast, as a result of the status quo of regional co- existence officially prescribing homogeneity and of institutionalized incitement of feud, seems to be a dead certain conditioning of life. His attitude against any kind of quailing, his manner of shrugging off or making fun of regional fixed ideas and minority melodramas, bodily and linguistic ‘Babylonization’ coalesce into a polyphonic credo of a poet standing in the shade of wrecking and falling apart.
The paper investigates how elements of magical realism are enacted through a Slavic mythical intertext in Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel Baba Jaga je snijela jaje (Baba Jaga Laid an Egg) (2008). It is a ...unique text in Croatian novelistic prose of the 2000s due to its inventive inclusion of mythlogical, ethnographical, ur-Slavonic and pre-Christian layers in a hybrid genre novelistic form, constructed through the author’s well known “patchwork” poetics. The characteristics of magical realism are here recognised as a narrative mode, which can be entirely incorporated into the genre hybrid, intertextual and interdiscursive multi-layered nature of the novel. These are: the irreducible elements of magic (the characters’ inexplicable powers and features, their influence on special and temporal relations as well as on the relationships of other characters, without any sense of bewilderment or disbelief); a detailed description of the world of phenomena (a mimetically represented reality of the life of elderly woman as well as the urban spaces of (South) Eastern Europe); the concordance of contradicting understandings of occurrences; the unification of different domains in the perception of reality (a lack of surety in the information received by the bodily senses) as well as a breach in the commonly received ideas on space, time and identity. In the entire novel an inherent sense of the marvellous is present underneath its mimetic framework, through which the transitional reality of post-communist countries (as a contrast between impoverished and decaying urban quarters with the decadent luxury in the highly stylised spaces of hotels and spas). The figurative nature of the characters of the elderly woman, founded on a mythic intertextuality, in this work it is interpreted as a figure of the voice of a suspended subject between two discursive systems: the transitional; the dominant and colonising, in which an elderly woman is a degraded object on the margins of society and a culturally submerged, mythic system in which an elderly woman is frighteningly powerful. According to S. Slemon and L. Hutcheon, the aim of magical realism is the creation of a liberating poetic for the suspended subject in the various contexts of marginalisation. However, it must be noted that due to the aforementioned mythological intertext on the witch Baba Yaga, upon which magical realism as a mode of narrative relies here, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg represents an innovative text within the corpus of Croatian novelistic prose on the theme of transition, so that due to the presence of its characteristic imaginarium we can place within this narrative model (despite some differences) which are represented in it.
In this paper the author describes the similarities in and differences among three Croatian travelogues written in the 19th century, from the time of the beginning of the Tanzimat reforms in the ...Ottoman Empire until 1879 when Austro-Hungary had already occupied Bosnia. Discussing issues regarding the genesis, form and substance in Pogled u Bosnu (Views on Bosnia) written by Matija Mažuranić (1842), in Putovanje po Bosni (Journeys through Bosnia) by Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski (1858) and in Putopisne crtice iz Bosne (Travel sketches from Bosnia) by Gjuro Pilar (1879), the author has striven to present the specific findings presented by the various authors to the Croatian public and emphasized, by using examples from these texts, the diversity of Croatian perspectives on Bosnia and its population. The author draws the conclusion that Mažuranić’s travel book has the most similarity with the common understanding of fictional narrative, that Kukuljević illustrates significant changes in the Croatian perception of Bosnian Muslims and that, from the documentary point of view, Pilar’s travel book can be considered the most reliable.
Report from the twelfth annual assembly of the Croatian Association of Children's Literature Researchers held in Zagreb, May 13, 2022. List of children's books that won the Croatian Children's Book ...Awards in 2021.
This paper analyzes the Croatian medieval drama The Passion of the Saint Margarita. The first part of the paper deals with the genre structure of virgin martyrs legends, while the focus is on the ...early Christian conceptualization of the phenomenon of martyrdom and virginity. Proceeding from the above, the second part of this paper analyzes the phenomenon of women’s heroic virginity in The Passion of the Saint Margarita.
The author gives an ecocritical reading of a short, unfinished novel by Vladan Desnica Pronalazak Athanatika (The Discovery of Athanatik). The paper comprises three thematic units: an ecocritical ...approach to a thematic cycle (life – death – immortality) in the novel, compared with Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari; an ecocritical analysis of rain as seen from the point of view of Susan Farrell’s ideas; and an analysis of Pronalazak Athanatika in the context of two dystopian ecological/environmental novels in contemporary Croatian literature, Planet Friedman by Josip Mlakić and Mjesečev meridijan (The Moon Meridian) by Edo Popović, with a comparison to ecocritical readings of Louise Squire. The author concludes that Pronalazak Athanatika – defined in genre terms as speculative fiction – makes Desnica a predecessor to current scientific considerations (Harari) and literary works (Mlakić, Popović) in warning that ecology and ecological factors – immortality and population increases, a lack of food, and ultimately the destruction of the planet – may have destructive effects on social change, the division of power, and the shape of the future.
