From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent: A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature

✍ Scribed by Tijana Matijevic

• Publisher: Transcript Verlag
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 281
• Series: (Lettre)
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This study of contemporary literature from the former Yugoslavia (Post-Yugoslavia) follows the ways in which the feminist writing of gender, body, sexuality, and social and cultural hierarchies brings to light the past of socialist Yugoslavia, its cultural and literary itineraries and its dissolution in the Yugoslav wars. The analysis also focuses on the particularities of different feminist writings, together with their picturing of possible futures. The title of the book suggests an attempt to interpret post-Yugoslav literature as feminist writing, but also a process of conceptualizing a post-Yugoslav literary field, in this study represented by contemporary fiction from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Contents
I Introduction: On Post-Yugoslavia and the Female Continent
I 1. Post-Yugoslav Literature: A Utopia and a Field
I 2. A Feminist Framing of the post-Yugoslav Literary Field
I 3. Summary
II Women’s Writing and Critical Nostalgia: On Ildiko Lovas’ Fiction
II 1. Borders of Time and Space and Authorship: “Via del Corso I”
II 2. On Real and Fictional Identities: “Stvarni konobar”
II 3. Totalitarianism and Misogyny: “Zlatna priča”
III Post-Yugoslav Écriture Féminine
III 1. Tanja Stupar Trifunović’s Satovi u majčinoj sobi: ‘Writing the Body’ as a Signpost
III 1.1. To Meet the (M)other
III 1.2. Female Difference and Writing
III 2. Tea Tulić’s Kosa posvuda: How to Write the Death of Mother
III 2.1. Female Camaraderie vs. Real World
III 2.2. Back to Chora? On Mother and Writing
III 3. Ivana Bodrožić’s Hotel Zagorje: The Death of the Father and the Coming of Age as the War Novel
III 3.1. To be a Refugee: Internalization and Reproduction of Enmity
III 3.2. Lures and Fears of Coming of Age
III 3.3. An Absent Witness to the Father’s Death
IV The Other Writing: Atonement and Female Authorship in Snežana Andrejević’s and Luka Bekavac’s Fiction
IV 1. Snežana Andrejević’s Životu je najteže: A ‘Two‐faced’ Narrator
IV 1.1. On the Front Line: Trans, Trance
IV 2. Luka Bekavac’s Drenje and Viljevo: Beyond Severed Ends of Space and Time
IV 3. The Medium is the Message: Female Voices and Sound
V What to Do With the Past? Feminist Literary Historiographies I: Olja Savičević Ivančević’s Adio, kauboju
V 1. On the Real, Fictional and Female Cowboys
V 2. Staging the Western. Why the Past Does Not Fit the Present?
V 3. Saint Fjoko Festival: Difference and the Carnevalization of Gender
V 4. The Body/House Trope: Essentialization and Emancipation
V 5. Marija Čarija’s Western: Righteousness and Tragic Heroin
V 6. Migrant, Worker, Author: An Open End as the Beginning
VI What to Do With the Past? Feminist Literary Historiographies II:Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba
VI 1. Objects of the Past, Past of the Objects: Past as Belonging(s)
VI 2. Parental Home: On (Im)possible Identifications
VI 3. Pol and Politika: Women in Pairs and the Politics of Literature
VI 4. Colonizing a Utopia: Jouissance, Difference and Authorship
VI 5. Neo‐avant-garde and Feminist Foundations of post-Yugoslav Literature
VI 5.1. Appendix: Situationist International and the Esoteric Neo‐avant-garde in Bernardijeva soba
VII Conclusions. Inherited Possibility, Or: Choosing The Optimal Variant
Bibliography