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.
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.
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.
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.
...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. When referring to Banat, the goal is to establish the historical, socio-cultural and literary heritage of the region by taking into account the prism of social connections, the exchanges of ideas and the reciprocal influence of various ethnic, religious and social groups. Mitteleuropa contains two different meanings: one is linked to the relatively recent tradition of pan- Germanism and has its sources in the discussions concerning the objectives of the First World War around 1914; the other revitalizes a much older tradition, that of the sacred Roman-German Empire. Books in Hungarian and German used to be common in both public and private libraries.
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.
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