Papers by Miranda Levanat-Peričić
Vesna Parun - stijena koju ispiru kiše, ur. Krešimir Bagić, 2024
Uz knjige "Pod muškim kišobranom" (1987) i "Noć za pakost" (2001), u primarnom je fokusu ovog rad... more Uz knjige "Pod muškim kišobranom" (1987) i "Noć za pakost" (2001), u primarnom je fokusu ovog rada Paruničin tekst "Krv svjedoka i cvijet" (1989), a interpretacija se, prateći zrcalne projekcije subjekta, koncentrira na ulogu koju u procesu rascjepa i udvajanja ima dijalog. Kao temeljni književni postupak u Krvi svjedoka, dijalog se odvija intersubjektno (u dvoglasnim iskazima tzv. „raskoljenog subjekta“ ili sarkasta) i intertekstno (u susretu tuđeg govora i vlastitog glasa, kao i uzajamnom susretu različitih diskursa i žanrova koji proizvode hibridnu konstrukciju). Rascjep subjektivnosti promatra se na nekoliko razina – kao rascjep između pripovjednog i lirskog subjekta na razini teksta, a između pjesnikinje i pripovjedačice na razini priče; kao kartezijanski dualizam koji unutrašnja proturječja nastoji prevladati konceptom jedinstva, odnosno vedantinskim monizmom s uporištem u Tagoreovoj Sādhani. Konačno, semantiku rascjepa nalazimo u ironijskom susretu Sokratove uloge i Tagoreove misli koja rezultira posthumanističkom vizijom „svjedočenja“ povijesti nakon kraja čovjeka.
Književnost i revolucije, ur. Zrinka Božić, Marina Protrka Štimec i Ana Tomljenović , 2024
Sintagma "postjugoslavenska književnost" u ovom se radu analizira u relaciji s pluralnim oblikom ... more Sintagma "postjugoslavenska književnost" u ovom se radu analizira u relaciji s pluralnim oblikom "postjugoslavenske književnosti" na koji se nadovezuje i preskriptivistička praksa koja singular kao jezičnu pogrešku lektorira u plural. Da bismo odgovorili na pitanje jesu li ovi pojmovi doista zamjenjivi u ovom radu najprije će se propitati povijest odnosa singulara i plurala "jugoslavenska(ske) književnost(i)" s obzirom na polemike koje je ta opreka proizvodila u razdoblju SFRJ. Počevši od 60-ih godina mogla su se izdvojiti dva temeljna pristupa tom pitanju: 1. integralistički/sinkretički (u kojemu su se skrivali ponekad kulturno hegemonijski, a ponekad i utopijsko idealistički ideologemi) i 2. pluralistički/partikularistički (motiviran uglavnom otporom prema prvom te ili zaštitom ili promoviranjem određenih nacionalnih interesa). S obzirom da jedinstvena povijest jugoslavenske književnosti, usprkos nastojanjima, nikada nije napisana izuzev kao sinteza nacionalnih književnosti, ni postjugoslavenska književnost ne može biti rezultat njezina kontinuiteta. Stoga zaključku o postjugoslavenskoj književnosti kao jednoj od postjugoslavenskih književnosti koja ne nastaje u organicističkoj koncepciji „rađanja“ iz jugoslavenske, nego svoj početak duguje kraju, prethodi izlaganje nekoliko aktualnih teorijskih pristupa u kojima se najoštrije razlike uspostavljaju na relaciji među pojmovima „transnacionalnog“ (manjinskog, decentraliziranog) i „nadnacionalnog“ (sinkretičkog, hegemonijskog).
Reconsidering (Post-) Yugoslav Time, 2022
Starting from the G. S. Morson objection that utopias describe an escape from history, while anti... more Starting from the G. S. Morson objection that utopias describe an escape from history, while anti-utopias describe an escape to history, this paper will try to give a typology of writing history in contemporary Croatian novels focused on possible (dystopian) futures.
The main differences between representations of history in dystopian novels can be found on two levels – first, in the selection of a certain part of history which a certain author finds relevant for the future, and second, in the modus/style of representation of the selected history.
Regarding the style or modus, the selected history in dystopian novels can be represented in two main ways – in its alternative version as a repeated event, or in a parody subversion, with the literary processes characteristic for the genre of Menippean satire. The difference between these two types of dystopian representation of history also reflected two different types of social engagement – first in order to affirm traditional values, often with antimodernist moods and worldviews (in antimodernist dystopia) and second with a radical break from traditional and canonical values (in dystopian menippea). This paper will approach the novels written by Josip Mlakić and Edo Popović as the representatives of the first type and the novels written by Borivoj Radaković and Ivo Balenović as the representatives of the second type.
Jewish Literatures and Cultures in Southeastern Europe. Experiences, Positions, Memories. Wien-Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2021: 375-394, 2021
Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018) was an Israeli writer from Bucovina who wrote in Hebrew, recalling i... more Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018) was an Israeli writer from Bucovina who wrote in Hebrew, recalling in his prose the lost Jewish world of Czernowitz. Among the many stories he wrote on the basis of his experiences as a survivor of the Shoah, there is one – sippur ḥayyim, 1999 (The Story of a Life, 2004) – which is partly included as intertext in the novel Totenwande by the Croatian authoress Daša Drndić (1946–2018). This is the starting point of the comparative analysis in this paper, which is aimed at exploring different authorial poetics, but also an attempt to place their writing in the context of different policies for dealing with the violent past of the World War II. Special attention will be paid to the topic of language(s), which is problematized in different ways in their Holocaust novels.
Periferno u hrvatskoj književnosti i kulturi / Peryferie w chorwackiej literaturze i kulturze, 2021
Objavljivanje knjige književnih kritika "Romani krize" Igora Mandića u Beogradu 1996. godine, kao... more Objavljivanje knjige književnih kritika "Romani krize" Igora Mandića u Beogradu 1996. godine, kao i prigodna promocija u Srbiji, bili su povodom oštrih napada hrvatskih medija na njezina autora. U ovom "slučaju", koji je sâm Mandić nazvao "hajkom kolegijalnog zbora elitnih komentatora" zbog jedne "beznačajne knjige književnih kritika", može se izdvojiti nekoliko perifernih razina koje se pokušavaju nametnuti kao dominantne, odnosno izboriti za povoljniju diskurzivnu poziciju. Prije svega, kompleks perifernog u samom je statusu književne kritike, rubnog pisma, inferiornog u odnosu prema prestižnim diskursima beletristike i književne teorije. No, kako Mandić u predgovoru "Romana krize" ističe, ovo "statusno i građanski totalno obezvrijeđeno pisanje, ma koliko bilo 'sitno', uvijek je kao 'simptom' moglo biti upotrijebljeno za potpaljivanje kakve politikantske uzbune". Bez obzira na ironijski modus ovakva stava, "politikantska uzbuna" koja je uslijedila u potpunosti se odmaknula od samog predmeta kojim se ta Mandićeva zbirka bavila, odnosno od jednog desetljeća srpske i hrvatske književne produkcije, od 80-ih do 90-ih godina. Konačno, upravo to književno razdoblje, koje Mandić određuje kao desetljeće nakon smrti J. B. Tita i M. Krleže do početka raspada SFRJ, kao posljednje desetljeće književnog i kulturnog života u zajedničkoj državi, nakon njezina raspada ostalo je i samo na povijesnoj periferiji novonastalih nacionalnih kanona. Međutim, najbitnija periferna razina cijelog ovog "slučaja" dotiče se samog pristupa književnom korpusu kojim se ova knjiga bavi, odnosno komparativnog proučavanja srpske i hrvatske književnosti, koje je u vremenu kada je objavljena, 1996. godine, s perifernih kulturnih pozicija shvaćena kao radikalna politička provokacija koja se javlja iz zajedničke prošlosti uime njezina obnavljanja. Premda se u radu posebna pozornost posvećuje Mandićevu izboru srpskih i hrvatskih književnih naslova, dakle samom sadržaju "Romana krize", s obzirom na to da kulturni kontekst ove knjige nadilazi književnokritičko vrednovanje desetljeća na koje se odnosi, njezin značaj pokušava se sagledati iz aspekta polemičkih diskursa koje je proizvela, pa makar i na periferiji hrvatskih devedesetih.
Književna smotra: časopis za svjetsku književnost, 2021
U prozi Amélie Nothomb učestalo se javlja semantički kompleks hrane, a u dvama romanima on je vez... more U prozi Amélie Nothomb učestalo se javlja semantički kompleks hrane, a u dvama romanima on je vezan uz likove gurmana ubojica – u njezinu prvom romanu "Higijena ubojice" (1992) to je pisac Prétextat Tach, a zatim u subverziji bajke "Plavobradi" (2012), lik don Elemiria Nibala y Milcara. Osim ljubavi prema hrani, gurmanski likovi Amélie Nothomb dijele tajanstveno aristokratsko porijeklo, skriveni zločin, bizarne teorije o ženama, nedostatak empatije i ekstravagantan život u izolaciji. Hrana u ovim romanima predstavlja dominantu oko koje se gradi lik na razini diskurza (u karakterizaciji gurmanskog lika neizravnom prezentacijom kroz govor i vanjski izgled), ali i na razini priče (u svim tematskim slojevima romana). Stoga ćemo književnim likovima gurmana pristupiti kroz analitički model koji je u tumačenju romana razvio Gajo Peleš uz pretpostavku da je u umrežavanju i interferenciji narativnih figura u semantičkoj substrukturi presudno projiciranje diskursa hrane na psihemskoj, sociemskoj i ontemskoj razini. S obzirom na to da se u ovim romanima tijelo pojavljuje kao vrijednost ontološke razine kojom se odmjeravaju sve ostale ideologemske pojedinačnosti – umjetnost, ljubav i vjera – u interpretaciju ćemo uključiti i njezin posljednji roman "Žeđ" (2020) koji predstavlja neku vrstu manifesta slavljenja tjelesnosti kroz religijsku temu. Dok prva dva romana pokazuje obilježja rabelaisovskog kronotopa, posljednji roman, premda ne pripada žanru parodia sacra, također afirmira vrijednosti otjelotvorenja svijeta. Naime, u toj evanđeoskoj pohvali tijela i tjelesnog iskustva kao presudnog za cjelovitu spoznaju smisla života, monološki progovara sâm Krist optužujući svog bestjelesnog oca za nerazumijevanje utjelovljenog potomstva. U tom smislu, i ovaj posljednji roman, kao dva prethodna može se čitati u ključu romaneskne tradicije koju Bahtin naziva karnevalskom linijom razvoja europskog romana.
THE CHARACTER OF A MONSTROUOUS GOURMET AND DESTRUCTIVE PANTAGRUELISM IN AMELIÉ NOTHOMB’S NOVELS
In Amélie Nothomb's fiction, the semantic complex of food appears frequently, and in two novels it is linked to the characters of gourmet-murders. In her first novel "Hygiène de l'assassin" (1992) [Hygiene and the Assassin] it is 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 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 (in 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 individuals – 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 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 key to the novelistic tradition, which Bakhtin calls the carnival line of development of the European novel.
Prvi Brešanov svibanj. Zbornik radova s međunarodnog znanstvenog skupa o djelu Ive Brešana održanog od 18. do 19. svibnja 2018. godine na Sveučilištu u Zadru, 2020
Brešanov roman Gorgone otvara cijeli niz pitanja u vezi s dimenzijom autora, njegovom ulogom u in... more Brešanov roman Gorgone otvara cijeli niz pitanja u vezi s dimenzijom autora, njegovom ulogom u interpretativnom procesu i njegovim pravima nad značenjem. Cijeli je roman u određenom smislu prožet nametljivom autorskom intencijom kontrole nad čitateljem i kritičarom, a istaknuta potreba redukcije njihove uloge u interpretaciji u konačnici dovodi do toga da se pisanje fikcije i pisanje interpretacije napisane fikcije u Gorgonama razvija gotovo simultano. Pritom se u romanu pojavljuje više različitih sudionika naracije koji multipliciranjem autorskih instanci usmjeravaju recepciju utvrđujući moć subjekta pripovijedanja. Na prvoj, temeljnoj fabularnoj razini javlja se heterodijegetični pripovjedač, a na drugoj, lik Autora koji čitatelja uvlači u sâm čin pisanja Perzeide, "spjeva bez razloga". U tom pseudoepu koji simulira ex-tempore izvedbene okolnosti, umetnute su i (pseudo)autobiografske epizode u kojima se uzastopce iskazuju i propituju autorske namjere. No, zbog izostanka tematsko-motivskih poveznica s glavnim fabularnim tijekom, uz nametljive alegorijske potencijale mitskog teksta, otpočetka je jasno da autor Perzeide usmjerava i kontrolira tumačenje Gorgona u cjelini, što pripovjedača te razine približava konstruktu implicitnog autora koji preuzima apsolutnu kontrolu nad interpretacijom razvlašćujući čitatelja. Zaigranost autora Brešana s Brešanovim Autorom i Brešanovim pripovjedačem postmodernistička je igra koja računa na tezu o irelevantnosti autora dok pišući Perzeidu izjavljuje "Moje ime je nevažno". Polazeći od spornih mjesta strukturalističkog odbacivanja autora i intencionalnosti iz interpretacije, rekonstrukcija autorske prisutnosti u Gorgonama podsjetit će na "obranu autora" E. D. Hirscha, kao i na relevantnost teorijskog okvira koji je sedamdesetih godina razvio Svetozar Petrović, suprotstavljajući se tada prevladavajućem zagovoru semantičke autonomije teksta razumijevanjem književnog djela kao "trodimenzionalne dijalektičke igre". Radi pokušaja da se u interpretaciju Brešanova romana uvede intencionalnost, u ovom radu otvara se i kompleksno naratološko pitanje odnosa implicitnog autora (implied author, IA) i stvarnog autora (flesh-and-blood person, FBP) uključujući zaključke koje su o tom pitanju iznijeli Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan i Wolf Schmid.
WHAT IS THE AUTHOR OF PERSEIDA TO THE AUTHOR OF GORGONE?
Brešan’s novel Gorgone opens up a whole range of questions related to the dimension of the author, his role in the interpretive process, and his rights over meaning. The whole novel is in a sense imbued with the intrusive authorial intention of controlling the reader and the critic, and the pronounced need to reduce their role in the interpretation ultimately leads to almost simultaneous evolution of the writing of the fiction and its interpretation in Gorgone. At the same time, several different narrators appear in the novel, who, by multiplying the author's instances, direct the reception by determining the power of the subject of the narration. On the first, fundamental fable level, a heterodiegetic narrator appears, and on the second, the character of the Author, who draws the reader into the very act of writing of Perzeida, ‘a poem without a cause’. In this pseudo-epic that simulates extempore performance circumstances, (pseudo)autobiographical episodes are inserted in which the author's intentions are successively expressed and questioned. However, due to the absence of thematic or motivational connections with the unfolding of the story, with intrusive allegorical potentials of the mythical text, it is clear from the beginning that the author of Perzeida directs and controls the interpretation of Gorgone as a whole, which brings the narrator of that level closer to the construct of the implicit author who takes absolute control of the interpretation by disempowering the reader. Brešan, the author, plays with Brešan's Author and Brešan's narrator in a postmodernist game that adopts the thesis of the author's irrelevance, as he declares ‘My name is irrelevant’ while writing Perzeida. Starting from the controversial points of structuralist rejection of the author and intentionality from interpretation, the reconstruction of the author's presence in Gorgone reminds us of ED Hirsch's ‘defense of the author,’ as well as the relevance of the theoretical framework developed by Svetozar Petrović in the 1970s, where the then prevailing advocacy of the semantic autonomy of the text was opposed by understanding the literary work as a ‘three-dimensional dialectical game.’ In order to try to introduce intentionality into the interpretation of Brešan's novel, this paper also opens a complex narratological question of the relationship between the implied author (IA) and the real author (flesh-and-blood person, FBP), including the conclusions Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan and Wolf Schmid made on this issue.
Fluminensia: časopis za filološka istraživanja, 2020
Književni opus Daše Drndić pripada zasebnom kanonu književnih tekstova koji autorica sama afirmir... more 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 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.
CANONICAL BIOGRAPHIES AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CANON OF DAŠA DRNDIĆ
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 an authoress who “draws” into her narrative space the voices of other authors and authoress, most often 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 Daša Drndić at the same time becomes the object of representation and the subject of mediation. So, to authoress's narrating join other narrators – Danilo Kiš, Bruno Schulz, Aharon Appelfeld, Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Wisława Szymborska, Witold Gombrowicz, Walter Benjamin and others. By treating authors' biographies and their literary texts as equally (un)reliable documents, selected authors are sometimes joined to her text through their literary texts and sometimes directly as participants in the narrative. The paper analyzes three procedures in the function of shaping a separate canon of literary texts: the procedure of fictionalizing authors' biographies, the procedure for multiplying implied authors, and the procedure of fictionalizing an autobiographical subject. While by fictionalizing authors as real historical figures, literary characters are multiplied, by multiplying 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.
Liber monstrorum balcanorum: čudovišni svijet europske margine. Ur. Miranda Levanat-Peričić i Tomislav Oroz. Zagreb: Jesenski i Turk – Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, str. 150-192, 2019
Polazeći od uvjerenja da se u tekstovima koje od srednjovjekovlja do suvremenosti proizvodi domin... more Polazeći od uvjerenja da se u tekstovima koje od srednjovjekovlja do suvremenosti proizvodi dominantna kultura, književne uloge marginalnih ili supkulturnih društvenih skupina oblikuju u skladu s diskurzivnim praksama koje drugost i čudovišnost povezuju u cjelinu, autorica u ovom prilogu prati nekoliko romskih epizoda hrvatske književnosti u kojima je slika Roma/Romkinje odigrala znakovitu ulogu. Prva se takva slika javlja u liku Jeđupke, koja svojim imenom priziva prepoznatljiv lik žene s ruba dubrovačke renesansne zbilje, ali u književnoj i dramskoj reprezentaciji njezina maska poprima određena obilježja nadnaravnog koje stupnjevito raste od Pelegrinovićeve gatare do Mažibradićeve Znahorice. No, bez obzira na udaljenost žene s ruba društva od vilenice nadnaravnih moći, bezopasna ludistička čudovišnost dubrovačkih jeđupijata daleko je od predodžbe o „romskoj opasnosti“ koja se u ostatku Europe od 15. do 20. stoljeća gradi na konfabulacijama o njihovoj političkoj nelojalnosti i na tjelesnoj nečistoći te zarazi kojom će inficirati društvo. Ističući da je rasistička retorika nacionalsocijalističkih dekreta samo kulminacija kontinuirane politike tretiranja Roma kao vrste infekcije i bolesti koju je potrebno istrijebiti, autorica izdvaja i analizira primjere u kojima se zloćudna argumentacija teze o ciganskoj pošasti (njem. Zigeunerplage) aktualizira u suvremenom kultur-nacionalističkom diskursu kroz recikliranje slike „imaginarnog Ciganina“.
Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne 16. Publishing House of the Poznań Society for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences, Adam Mickiewicz University, pp. 159-174. ISSN 2084-3011, 2019
Since the (re) structuring collective memory always implies particular political processes, in th... more 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.
COLLOQUIA HUMANISTICA No. 7. Against Homogeneity. Transcultural and Trans-Lingual Strategies in Cultural Production, 2018
Although the chronotopic approach to the novels of exile is almost self-explanatory, the specific... more Although the chronotopic approach to the novels of exile is almost self-explanatory, the specific features of post-Yugoslav exile narrations evoke a separate chronotopic interpretation. First of all, post-Yugoslav literature is loaded with an additional identity burden as the areas abandoned in the 1990s do not disappear for the exiled writer at a metaphorical level, by turning into a mnemotope, but in the actual breakup of the political entity, whereby the imaginary supranational heritage is transformed into a kind of counterculture, mostly affirmed exactly by the mediation of exile writers.
Therefore, return to the once abandoned area often becomes possible only as a return to the past. In this paper, the literary theme of exile will be comparatively followed, starting 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"). This 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 chronotope of exile is dealt with at the level of genre, as the major, supreme chronotope that includes or opens space to a series of specific local chronotopes or motifs, 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, chronotopic as 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 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.
Komparativna povijest hrvatske književnosti. Književni kanon. Zbornik radova s XX. međunarodnoga znanstvenog skupa održanog od 28. do 29. rujna 2017. u Splitu, 2018
Književnokritičkom opusu Igora Mandića pristupa se najprije posredno, iz perspektive nestabilnog ... more Književnokritičkom opusu Igora Mandića pristupa se najprije posredno, iz perspektive nestabilnog položaja književne kritike u sustavu znanosti o književnosti obzirom na odnos prema teoriji i povijesti, koji se učestalo vidi i predstavlja kao odnos inferiornog (i ne posve znanstvenog) žanra prema dominantnim (i prestižnim) znanstvenim žanrovima. Raskoljena pozicija kritičara, kojemu se u normativnim pristupima odriče pravo na interpretaciju s teorijskim uporištem, a pritom od njega traži odgovorno vrednovanje u smislu pretpovijesnog posla koji bi trebao tek sugestijom olakšati povjesničaru ozbiljan i odgovoran posao kanonizacije, dovodi i kritičare i teoretičare do metafora kojima određuju kritiku kao „prljav posao“ na književnom polju. Zauzimajući se za dignitet kritičarskog posla već u svojim prvim publicističkim tekstovima, Mandić se oštro suprotstavlja tzv. „kabinetskoj kritici“ uime svoje, „tekuće“ ili „praktične kritike“. Budući da je polemičnost otpočetka istaknuto obilježje Mandićeva pisma, u posebnom osvrtu na dvije njegove istaknute polemike – s Predragom Matvejevićem 1975. i Stankom Lasićem 1997. godine – nastoji se pokazati problemski pomak od estetsko-ideoloških pitanja kojima je zaokupljen sedamdesetih do identitetsko-ideoloških u devedesetima. Dok je s Matvejevićem, naizgled odbijajući polemizirati o odnosu elitne i masovne kulture, Mandić utvrđivao kompetencijske i predmetne granice književne i akademske kritike, s Lasićem je, promišljajući o odnosu prema suvremenoj srpskoj književnosti, otvorio pitanja nestabilnih granica nacionalnog kanona. U tom se kontekstu u zaključku otvara tema položaja stranih pisaca u nacionalnom kanonu, budući da problematičnoj aktualizaciji te teme nakon raspada Jugoslavije Mandić posvećuje niz tekstova – od „Književnih mamurluka postkomunizma“(1993.) do „Hitne službe za provjetravanje hrvatske književne garsonijere“ (2001.).
IGOR MANDIĆ'S LITERARY CRITICISM AND PROCESSES OF (DE)CANONIZATION IN THE NINETIES
Igor Mandić's literary criticism is firstly approached indirectly, from the perspective of an unstable position of literary criticism in the system of literary science due to the relationship of theory and history, which is often seen and presented as a relationship of an inferior (and not utterly scientific) genre towards the dominant (and prestigious) scientific genres. The split position of a critic, whose right to interpretation with theoretical background is normatively denounced, and yet he is asked for a responsible evaluation in the sense of a prehistorical work which should through suggestion make the work of canonization easier for the historian, brings both critics and theorists to using metaphors by which they define literary criticism as a “dirty work” in the literary field. Standing up for the dignity of literary criticism Mandić has already in his early works stood up to so-called “cabinet-criticism” in the name of his, “fluid” or “practical criticism”. Since from the very beginning the polemic character is a characteristic of Mandić's writing, in a special review of his two distinguished polemics – with Predrag Matvejević in 1915 and with Stanko Lasić in 1991 – paper tries to show the shift from the aesthetically-ideological questions, which occupied him in the seventies, towards the questions of identity and ideology in the nineties. While with Matvejević, seemingly refusing to polemicize about the relationship of high and mass culture, Mandić was determining the competency and subject boundaries of both literary and academic criticism, with Lasi6, considering the relationship towards the contemporary Serbian literature, he has raised the questions about the instability of national canon. In that context the conclusion opens up the topic of the position of foreign writers in the national canon, since after the breakup of Yugoslavia Mandić has dedicated a series of texts to the problematic actualization of this topic – from "The Literary Hangover of Postcommunism" ("Književni mamurluci postkomunizma", 1993) to "ER for Ventilating Croatian Literary Studio Apartment" ("Hitna služba za provjetravanje hrvatske književne garsonijere", 2001).
Narodna umjetnost: hrvatski časopis za etnologiju i folkloristiku , 2017
Budući da je u postjugoslavenskim povijesnim okolnostima klasna solidarnost shvaćena kao dominant... more Budući da je u postjugoslavenskim povijesnim okolnostima klasna solidarnost shvaćena kao dominantno ideološko obilježje napuštenog samoupravnog socijalizma, tranzicijske diskurzivne prakse koje isključuju koncept radnika manifestirale su se na svim razinama, od novogovora koji je hrvatskom leksiku devedesetih uveo neoliberalizmu podobniji supstitut "djelatnika" , do razvlašćivanja u novom vrijednosnom sustavu kojim dominiraju poduzetnici kao ideal i pokretačka sila novog društva. Time su od samoupravljača i proizvođača radnici najprije pretvoreni u ideološke Druge, a zatim u realne "bivše radnike", koji su u tranzicijskoj zbilji iz vitalnog dijela kreativne sadašnjosti i utopijskih projekcija progresa, premješteni u umirovljenu prošlost. Zbog svega toga znakovito je da se u suvremenoj književnosti radnik opet javlja kao naslovni leksem i kao književni lik – povratak radnika događa se iste godine u drami Gorana Ferčeca "Radnice u gladovanju" (2014), kao i u prozama Viktora Ivančića "Radnici i seljaci" (2014). Književne reprezentacije radnika u tim se tekstovima razvijaju u kontekstu nove utopijske žudnje, ali i pobune protiv monstruozno izokrenute logike korporacijskog kapitalizma koja humanost pretvara u ozbiljnu devijaciju. Pritom se posebna pozornost obraća reprezentaciji prostora pobune s obzirom na koncept heterotopije – starački dom, zatvor ili bolnica ona su protumjesta na kojima se tranzicijska zbilja okrutno poigrala s "bivšim" radnikom i uništenim potencijalima koje je stvarao u svojim projekcijama budućnosti.
Ključne riječi: druga tranzicija, radnice, kulturni radnik, heterotopija krize, heterotopija devijacije
THE WORKING CLASS IN THE POST-YUGOSLAV REALITY AND THE REPRESENTATION OF WORKERS IN THE CROATIAN LITERATURE: ON THE BORDERLINE BETWEEN THE HETEROTOPIA OF CRISIS AND OF DEVIATION
In the historical circumstances of the post-Yugoslav era, class solidarity was regarded as the dominant ideological characteristic of the abandoned self-management socialism. Therefore, transition-related discursive practices which excluded the notion of the worker were common on all levels. This ranged from the Croatian 1990s newspeak which introduced the more neoliberal term djelatnik “employe” into the lexicon, to disempowering the worker within the newly-introduced value system dominated by entrepreneurs as the epitome and the driving force of the new society. In this way, workers were fi rst transformed from selfmanagers and producers into ideological Others, and then into actual “former workers”, relocated from being the vital segment of the creative present and representing utopian projections of progress into a retired past. Given all this, it is signifi cant to note that the worker is once again being used in book titles and as a literary character in contemporary literature – in 2014, the return of the worker is notable in Goran Ferčec’s play "Radnice u gladovanju" (Female Workers on Hunger Strike, 2014), and in Viktor Ivančić’s prose stories "Radnici i seljaci" (Workers and Peasants, 2014). Literary representations of workers in these texts are contextualized within a framework of a new utopian desire and in revolt against the monstrously inverted logic of corporate capitalism which transforms humanity into a serious deviation. Special attention is given to the representation of the space of rebellion taking into consideration the notion of heterotopia: a nursing home, a prison or a hospital are counter-places where the transition-related reality played its cruel game with the “former” worker and the destroyed potentials that it created in his/her projections of the future.
Keywords: the second transition, female workers, cultural workers, the heterotopia of crisis, the heterotopia od deviation
Riječki filološki dani. Zbornik radova s Desetoga znanstvenog skupa s međunarodnim sudjelovanjem održanoga u Rijeci od 27. do 29. studenoga 2014. / Badurina, Lada ; Palašić, Nikolina (ur.), 2016
"Posthumano stanje" suvremene književnosti ogleda se u njezinoj izrazitoj upletenosti u ključna m... more "Posthumano stanje" suvremene književnosti ogleda se u njezinoj izrazitoj upletenosti u ključna mjesta posthumanističke refleksije, među kojima "endizam" kao ideja kraja povijesti, vremena i čovjeka, destabiliziranjem biološke i kulturološke kategorije ljudskosti i koncentracijom na neljudsko i čudovišno, kreativno uznemiruje i potiče apokaliptične narative o alarmantnoj suvremenosti i njezinim znakovima kraja. Budući da spekulativna fikcija pokazuje sklonost problematiziranju ljudskosti u biološkom smislu (ističući biotehnološku hibridnost kao mogućnost brisanja i pomicanje granica među vrstama) i problematiziranju humanizma/humanosti u kulturološkom smislu (ističući etičku dimenziju problema koncentracijom na nedostatnu empatiju posthumanog života i njegovu " neljudsku ljudskost "), metodološko polazište propitivanja odnosa posthumanističke refleksije i književnosti u ovom je radu teorija čudovišta (monster theory), koja kao osobit izdanak postkolonijalne teorije diskursa, može ponuditi čvrst interpretativni oslonac u pristupu izabranim književnim tekstovima (J. Mlakić, "Planet Friedman", R. Bacigalupi, "Djevojka na navijanje", M. Atwood, "Gazela i Kosac"), kao i propitivanju njihova odnosa prema ishodišnim i starijim distopijskim poetikama (A. Huxley, "Divni novi svijet", Ph. Dick, "Sanjaju li androidi električne ovce?").
[sic] - a journal of literature, culture and literary translation, 2016
Beginning with the concept of "nesting orientalism" introduced by Milica Bakić-Hayden in the sens... more 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 traveling 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.
Komparativna povijest hrvatske književnosti. Vrsta ili žanr. Zbornik radova s XIX. međunarodnoga skupa održanog od 29. do 30. rujna 2016. godine u Splitu / Glunčić-Bužančić, Vinka ; Grgić, Kristina (ur.) , 2017
Distopijski roman najčešće se određuje obzirom na sadržaj, kao roman kojemu je tema negativna, a ... more Distopijski roman najčešće se određuje obzirom na sadržaj, kao roman kojemu je tema negativna, a često i postapokaliptična vizija društva budućnosti. Uz pretpostavku da je distopijski roman žanr čija poetika prekoračuje granice što ih je Darko Suvin postavio između začudne (znanstveno-fantastične) i naturalističke fikcije, te se samim tim ne može smatrati pod-žanrom znanstvene fantastike, navedeno tematsko određenje u ovom se radu nadopunjuje određenim strukturalnim i formalnim specifičnostima. Pritom se žanrovskim problemima pristupa iz nekoliko pozicija, najprije iz aspekta Pavličićeve definicije žanra, a zatim postavljajući Suvinovu teoriju znanstvene fantastike u suodnos s općom teorijom žanra Johna Frowa.
Poredbeni dvogledi, 2017
Premda historiografsku građu ne uzimaju kao svoje polazište, romani koji su obilježili hrvatsku n... more Premda historiografsku građu ne uzimaju kao svoje polazište, romani koji su obilježili hrvatsku novomilenijsku književnost, razvijaju osobit odnos prema povijesti i prema "mjestu povijesti", osobito povijesti izabranog grada i njegovih "protumjesta". Riječ je o romanima Ivane Sajko, "Povijest moje obitelji od 1941 do 1991, i nakon" (2009.), Olje Savičević Ivančević, "Adio kauboju" (2010.), Ivane Simić Bodrožić, "Hotel Zagorje" (2010.), Zorana Ferića, "Kalendar Maja" (2011.) i Kristiana Novaka, "Črna mati zemla" (2013). Za razliku od novopovijesnih romana, u navedenim djelima historiografska građa nije glavno polazište, no povijest se predstavlja u kontekstu koji je blizak formuli historiografske metafikcije, dakle izrazito subverzivno u odnosu na konvencionalnu povijesnu naraciju, uz niz postupaka karakterističnih za provokativnog postmodernog pripovjedača. Bez obzira na različitost autorskih poetika, zbog zajedničke semantike vremena, koja se manifestira kroz konfliktni odnos prema priznatoj ili afirmiranoj povijesti, nazvat ću ih "protupovijesnim" romanima. U spomenutim se romanima protupovijesni odnos prema zbilji iskazuje dvojako – ili kroz narativni sukob "nenapisane" povijesti (koju zastupa fikcija) s poviješću "velikog teksta" (koju zastupa fakcija), ili kroz sukob "male" (privatne, obiteljske, potisnute, marginalizirane) povijesti s "velikom" (kolektivnom, državotvornom, udžbeničkom, metropolskom) poviješću. Pritom je važno istaknuti da se pojam protupovijesni roman ne odnosi samo na pripovjedački stav nego i na vezivanje uz protumjesto, dakle na heterotopijsko smještanje povijesti, na njezino dislociranje, preseljenje, pa i parazitsko useljavanje na ispražnjene lokalitete opterećene vremenom i odbačenim povijesnim značenjima.
Komparativna povijest hrvatske književnosti. Fantastika: problem zbilje. Zbornik radova sa XVIII. međunarodnoga znanstvenog skupa održanog od 24. do 25. rujna 2015. godine u Splitu / Pavlović, Cvijeta ; Glunčić-Bužančić, Vinka ; Meyer-Fraatz, Andrea (ur.), 2016
Dva romana, Šufflayev "Na Pacifiku god. 2255." i Mlakićev "Planet Friedman", omeđuju raspon od 90... more Dva romana, Šufflayev "Na Pacifiku god. 2255." i Mlakićev "Planet Friedman", omeđuju raspon od 90 godina te im se stoga i pristupa uz pretpostavku da se u rasponu u kojemu nastaju, od 1922. do 2012. godine, može uočiti razvoj određenih žanrovskih specifičnosti unutar polja spekulativne fikcije. Žanrovsko određenje dvaju romana promatra se najprije iz formalne perspektive, obzirom na autopoetičke komentare prisutne u samom djelu, a zatim i sadržajno i tematski, obzirom na dva dominantna idejna aspekta distopijske spekulativne fikcije, endizam i biopolitiku. Poredbena interpretacija pokazuje da se formalno i sadržajno, u povijesnom rasponu od Šufflaya do Mlakića može pratiti razvoj od proto-žanra do prototipa žanra distopijskog romana, koji u ovim hrvatskim romanima pokazuje metažanrovska obilježja, najprije obzirom na izabranu književnu tradiciju u koju se nastoji upisati, a zatim i tako što alternativni svijet ne projicira samo u budućnost nego i u kulturološki prostore kojima distopija izvorno pripada. U konačnici, istaknuta metažanrovska označenost oblika distopije u Šufflayevu i Mlakićevu romanu rezultirala je potpunim odsustvom nacionalno obilježenih prostora i nacionalne književne tradicije.
Intelektualac danas. Zbornik radova s Desničinih susreta 2013., 2014
Polazeći od Žižekove (endističke) tipologije reakcija društvene svijesti na apokaliptična vremena... more Polazeći od Žižekove (endističke) tipologije reakcija društvene svijesti na apokaliptična vremena trajne i progresivne ekonomske krize, u radu se analizira publicistički i književni diskurs suvremenih hrvatskih "korporacijskih" intelektualaca, odnosno novinara i pisaca koji su svoj intelektualni rad vezali uz istu medijsku korporaciju. Povod je toj usporedbi polemika koja se 2012. godine razvila oko pitanja subvencioniranja kulture i književnosti u uvjetima tržišnog kapitalizma, u kojoj su novinari i pisci zauzeli oprečne pozicije, u javnosti predstavljene kroz opreku populističkoga kulturnog programa Ante Tomića nasuprot zagovoru elitističke kulture Jurice Pavičića. Kako zapravo u književnom tekstu funkcionira populistički književni program najavljen u novinskim člancima, analizira se na primjeru Tomićeva romana-reklame "Vegeta blues" (2009.), koji je nastao po narudžbi jedne prehrambene tvrtke u svrhu promoviranja njezinih proizvoda, a koncepcije elitne, visoke kulture ilustriraju se primjerom Pavičićeve priče "Brod u dvorištu" (2011.). Definirano Žižekovim pojmovljem, ono što nam je predstavljeno kao populizam zapravo je "poricanje u liberalnoj utopiji" , dok je elitizam tek oblik "ideološke ošamućenosti".
Književna smotra, 2012
As is well known, the Indian English novel "Animal's People" was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Boo... more As is well known, the Indian English novel "Animal's People" was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize and is the winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writer's Prize: Best Book From Europe & South Asia. In many details the novel corresponds with the real event known as the 1984 Bhopal disaster or Bhopal Gas Tragedy.
This essay approaches Animal's People as an example of a posthumanistic novel, in particular as it questions the relations between the human and the nonhuman (contained already in the title) and between the rational and the irrational (by giving up narration to an irrational voice). The notion of posthumanism is derived from postmodernist critics such as François Lyotard, Stuart Sim and Terry Eagleton, who generally speaking share a conviction that we live in a post-humanistic world, where humanistic ideals are not acceptable any more. Besides they are sceptical about human virtues, expressing doubts particularly about the power of reason, and emphasizing above all ethical disadvantages of rationality.
In addition to that, the idea of "heterotopias" presented in Michel Foucault's article "Of Other Spaces" (1967) is the starting point of interpretation of space and time in Sinha's novel. In distinction from utopias and dystopias which are fundamentally unreal spaces, Foucault considers heterotopias as real places, as counter-sites in which all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented and inverted. In this essay the concept of heterotopia is linked with Indian slums or bidonvilles referred in the Sinha's novel as "The Kingdom of the Poor" in Khaufpur (meaning "Horror Town" in Hindi), where people live in extreme poverty suffering from after-effects of the poison caused by the chemical factory's fallout. The slums constitute heterotopias in the sense that they figure as discriminated monstrous zones where society removes and hides its abhorrent poverty, creating enclosed and isolated places. Those discriminated zones function simultaneously as "inner pockets" of resistance and as a mirror- image of the society which has created it. Since heterotopia is linked with time, it signals an absolute break from traditional time, thus creating heterochrony. In that sense, as a kind of heterotopia of indefinitely accumulating time, we also find heterochrony in Khaufpuri slums where, as an afterlife, time ceases to have meaning turning into an eternal "now". After "that night" had happened, the catastrophe cancelled time and created an eternity of suffering and agony. The signs of apocalyptical time in Sinha's novel are punctuated by frequent quotations from the Book of Revelation, but also with allusions on Ḳayāmat as the Hinduistic idea of the annihilation. To that chain of apocalyptical subtexts of the novel, one should add Dante's Inferno and the concept of the nine circles of Hell represented by two events, both connected with fire, fever, mortification and mental agony – "Nautapa" (nine days of extreme heat) and "Ashara Mubarak" (the night of the fire walk, after nine days of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar).
Since hybridity of the apocalyptic religious signs correlates with the hybrid language of the novel, at the end of this essay the issue of such a mixed language describing is addressed labelling it as "hinglish" (mixture of Hindi and English), "hinçais" (mixture of Hindi and French), and "franglais" (mixture of French and English), respectively.
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Papers by Miranda Levanat-Peričić
The main differences between representations of history in dystopian novels can be found on two levels – first, in the selection of a certain part of history which a certain author finds relevant for the future, and second, in the modus/style of representation of the selected history.
Regarding the style or modus, the selected history in dystopian novels can be represented in two main ways – in its alternative version as a repeated event, or in a parody subversion, with the literary processes characteristic for the genre of Menippean satire. The difference between these two types of dystopian representation of history also reflected two different types of social engagement – first in order to affirm traditional values, often with antimodernist moods and worldviews (in antimodernist dystopia) and second with a radical break from traditional and canonical values (in dystopian menippea). This paper will approach the novels written by Josip Mlakić and Edo Popović as the representatives of the first type and the novels written by Borivoj Radaković and Ivo Balenović as the representatives of the second type.
THE CHARACTER OF A MONSTROUOUS GOURMET AND DESTRUCTIVE PANTAGRUELISM IN AMELIÉ NOTHOMB’S NOVELS
In Amélie Nothomb's fiction, the semantic complex of food appears frequently, and in two novels it is linked to the characters of gourmet-murders. In her first novel "Hygiène de l'assassin" (1992) [Hygiene and the Assassin] it is 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 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 (in 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 individuals – 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 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 key to the novelistic tradition, which Bakhtin calls the carnival line of development of the European novel.
WHAT IS THE AUTHOR OF PERSEIDA TO THE AUTHOR OF GORGONE?
Brešan’s novel Gorgone opens up a whole range of questions related to the dimension of the author, his role in the interpretive process, and his rights over meaning. The whole novel is in a sense imbued with the intrusive authorial intention of controlling the reader and the critic, and the pronounced need to reduce their role in the interpretation ultimately leads to almost simultaneous evolution of the writing of the fiction and its interpretation in Gorgone. At the same time, several different narrators appear in the novel, who, by multiplying the author's instances, direct the reception by determining the power of the subject of the narration. On the first, fundamental fable level, a heterodiegetic narrator appears, and on the second, the character of the Author, who draws the reader into the very act of writing of Perzeida, ‘a poem without a cause’. In this pseudo-epic that simulates extempore performance circumstances, (pseudo)autobiographical episodes are inserted in which the author's intentions are successively expressed and questioned. However, due to the absence of thematic or motivational connections with the unfolding of the story, with intrusive allegorical potentials of the mythical text, it is clear from the beginning that the author of Perzeida directs and controls the interpretation of Gorgone as a whole, which brings the narrator of that level closer to the construct of the implicit author who takes absolute control of the interpretation by disempowering the reader. Brešan, the author, plays with Brešan's Author and Brešan's narrator in a postmodernist game that adopts the thesis of the author's irrelevance, as he declares ‘My name is irrelevant’ while writing Perzeida. Starting from the controversial points of structuralist rejection of the author and intentionality from interpretation, the reconstruction of the author's presence in Gorgone reminds us of ED Hirsch's ‘defense of the author,’ as well as the relevance of the theoretical framework developed by Svetozar Petrović in the 1970s, where the then prevailing advocacy of the semantic autonomy of the text was opposed by understanding the literary work as a ‘three-dimensional dialectical game.’ In order to try to introduce intentionality into the interpretation of Brešan's novel, this paper also opens a complex narratological question of the relationship between the implied author (IA) and the real author (flesh-and-blood person, FBP), including the conclusions Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan and Wolf Schmid made on this issue.
CANONICAL BIOGRAPHIES AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CANON OF DAŠA DRNDIĆ
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 an authoress who “draws” into her narrative space the voices of other authors and authoress, most often 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 Daša Drndić at the same time becomes the object of representation and the subject of mediation. So, to authoress's narrating join other narrators – Danilo Kiš, Bruno Schulz, Aharon Appelfeld, Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Wisława Szymborska, Witold Gombrowicz, Walter Benjamin and others. By treating authors' biographies and their literary texts as equally (un)reliable documents, selected authors are sometimes joined to her text through their literary texts and sometimes directly as participants in the narrative. The paper analyzes three procedures in the function of shaping a separate canon of literary texts: the procedure of fictionalizing authors' biographies, the procedure for multiplying implied authors, and the procedure of fictionalizing an autobiographical subject. While by fictionalizing authors as real historical figures, literary characters are multiplied, by multiplying 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.
Therefore, return to the once abandoned area often becomes possible only as a return to the past. In this paper, the literary theme of exile will be comparatively followed, starting 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"). This 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 chronotope of exile is dealt with at the level of genre, as the major, supreme chronotope that includes or opens space to a series of specific local chronotopes or motifs, 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, chronotopic as 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 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.
IGOR MANDIĆ'S LITERARY CRITICISM AND PROCESSES OF (DE)CANONIZATION IN THE NINETIES
Igor Mandić's literary criticism is firstly approached indirectly, from the perspective of an unstable position of literary criticism in the system of literary science due to the relationship of theory and history, which is often seen and presented as a relationship of an inferior (and not utterly scientific) genre towards the dominant (and prestigious) scientific genres. The split position of a critic, whose right to interpretation with theoretical background is normatively denounced, and yet he is asked for a responsible evaluation in the sense of a prehistorical work which should through suggestion make the work of canonization easier for the historian, brings both critics and theorists to using metaphors by which they define literary criticism as a “dirty work” in the literary field. Standing up for the dignity of literary criticism Mandić has already in his early works stood up to so-called “cabinet-criticism” in the name of his, “fluid” or “practical criticism”. Since from the very beginning the polemic character is a characteristic of Mandić's writing, in a special review of his two distinguished polemics – with Predrag Matvejević in 1915 and with Stanko Lasić in 1991 – paper tries to show the shift from the aesthetically-ideological questions, which occupied him in the seventies, towards the questions of identity and ideology in the nineties. While with Matvejević, seemingly refusing to polemicize about the relationship of high and mass culture, Mandić was determining the competency and subject boundaries of both literary and academic criticism, with Lasi6, considering the relationship towards the contemporary Serbian literature, he has raised the questions about the instability of national canon. In that context the conclusion opens up the topic of the position of foreign writers in the national canon, since after the breakup of Yugoslavia Mandić has dedicated a series of texts to the problematic actualization of this topic – from "The Literary Hangover of Postcommunism" ("Književni mamurluci postkomunizma", 1993) to "ER for Ventilating Croatian Literary Studio Apartment" ("Hitna služba za provjetravanje hrvatske književne garsonijere", 2001).
Ključne riječi: druga tranzicija, radnice, kulturni radnik, heterotopija krize, heterotopija devijacije
THE WORKING CLASS IN THE POST-YUGOSLAV REALITY AND THE REPRESENTATION OF WORKERS IN THE CROATIAN LITERATURE: ON THE BORDERLINE BETWEEN THE HETEROTOPIA OF CRISIS AND OF DEVIATION
In the historical circumstances of the post-Yugoslav era, class solidarity was regarded as the dominant ideological characteristic of the abandoned self-management socialism. Therefore, transition-related discursive practices which excluded the notion of the worker were common on all levels. This ranged from the Croatian 1990s newspeak which introduced the more neoliberal term djelatnik “employe” into the lexicon, to disempowering the worker within the newly-introduced value system dominated by entrepreneurs as the epitome and the driving force of the new society. In this way, workers were fi rst transformed from selfmanagers and producers into ideological Others, and then into actual “former workers”, relocated from being the vital segment of the creative present and representing utopian projections of progress into a retired past. Given all this, it is signifi cant to note that the worker is once again being used in book titles and as a literary character in contemporary literature – in 2014, the return of the worker is notable in Goran Ferčec’s play "Radnice u gladovanju" (Female Workers on Hunger Strike, 2014), and in Viktor Ivančić’s prose stories "Radnici i seljaci" (Workers and Peasants, 2014). Literary representations of workers in these texts are contextualized within a framework of a new utopian desire and in revolt against the monstrously inverted logic of corporate capitalism which transforms humanity into a serious deviation. Special attention is given to the representation of the space of rebellion taking into consideration the notion of heterotopia: a nursing home, a prison or a hospital are counter-places where the transition-related reality played its cruel game with the “former” worker and the destroyed potentials that it created in his/her projections of the future.
Keywords: the second transition, female workers, cultural workers, the heterotopia of crisis, the heterotopia od deviation
regarded by Žižek as a kind of inverted racism which is allowed when comparing "tolerant" Europe to Balkan Otherness.
This essay approaches Animal's People as an example of a posthumanistic novel, in particular as it questions the relations between the human and the nonhuman (contained already in the title) and between the rational and the irrational (by giving up narration to an irrational voice). The notion of posthumanism is derived from postmodernist critics such as François Lyotard, Stuart Sim and Terry Eagleton, who generally speaking share a conviction that we live in a post-humanistic world, where humanistic ideals are not acceptable any more. Besides they are sceptical about human virtues, expressing doubts particularly about the power of reason, and emphasizing above all ethical disadvantages of rationality.
In addition to that, the idea of "heterotopias" presented in Michel Foucault's article "Of Other Spaces" (1967) is the starting point of interpretation of space and time in Sinha's novel. In distinction from utopias and dystopias which are fundamentally unreal spaces, Foucault considers heterotopias as real places, as counter-sites in which all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented and inverted. In this essay the concept of heterotopia is linked with Indian slums or bidonvilles referred in the Sinha's novel as "The Kingdom of the Poor" in Khaufpur (meaning "Horror Town" in Hindi), where people live in extreme poverty suffering from after-effects of the poison caused by the chemical factory's fallout. The slums constitute heterotopias in the sense that they figure as discriminated monstrous zones where society removes and hides its abhorrent poverty, creating enclosed and isolated places. Those discriminated zones function simultaneously as "inner pockets" of resistance and as a mirror- image of the society which has created it. Since heterotopia is linked with time, it signals an absolute break from traditional time, thus creating heterochrony. In that sense, as a kind of heterotopia of indefinitely accumulating time, we also find heterochrony in Khaufpuri slums where, as an afterlife, time ceases to have meaning turning into an eternal "now". After "that night" had happened, the catastrophe cancelled time and created an eternity of suffering and agony. The signs of apocalyptical time in Sinha's novel are punctuated by frequent quotations from the Book of Revelation, but also with allusions on Ḳayāmat as the Hinduistic idea of the annihilation. To that chain of apocalyptical subtexts of the novel, one should add Dante's Inferno and the concept of the nine circles of Hell represented by two events, both connected with fire, fever, mortification and mental agony – "Nautapa" (nine days of extreme heat) and "Ashara Mubarak" (the night of the fire walk, after nine days of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar).
Since hybridity of the apocalyptic religious signs correlates with the hybrid language of the novel, at the end of this essay the issue of such a mixed language describing is addressed labelling it as "hinglish" (mixture of Hindi and English), "hinçais" (mixture of Hindi and French), and "franglais" (mixture of French and English), respectively.
The main differences between representations of history in dystopian novels can be found on two levels – first, in the selection of a certain part of history which a certain author finds relevant for the future, and second, in the modus/style of representation of the selected history.
Regarding the style or modus, the selected history in dystopian novels can be represented in two main ways – in its alternative version as a repeated event, or in a parody subversion, with the literary processes characteristic for the genre of Menippean satire. The difference between these two types of dystopian representation of history also reflected two different types of social engagement – first in order to affirm traditional values, often with antimodernist moods and worldviews (in antimodernist dystopia) and second with a radical break from traditional and canonical values (in dystopian menippea). This paper will approach the novels written by Josip Mlakić and Edo Popović as the representatives of the first type and the novels written by Borivoj Radaković and Ivo Balenović as the representatives of the second type.
THE CHARACTER OF A MONSTROUOUS GOURMET AND DESTRUCTIVE PANTAGRUELISM IN AMELIÉ NOTHOMB’S NOVELS
In Amélie Nothomb's fiction, the semantic complex of food appears frequently, and in two novels it is linked to the characters of gourmet-murders. In her first novel "Hygiène de l'assassin" (1992) [Hygiene and the Assassin] it is 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 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 (in 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 individuals – 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 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 key to the novelistic tradition, which Bakhtin calls the carnival line of development of the European novel.
WHAT IS THE AUTHOR OF PERSEIDA TO THE AUTHOR OF GORGONE?
Brešan’s novel Gorgone opens up a whole range of questions related to the dimension of the author, his role in the interpretive process, and his rights over meaning. The whole novel is in a sense imbued with the intrusive authorial intention of controlling the reader and the critic, and the pronounced need to reduce their role in the interpretation ultimately leads to almost simultaneous evolution of the writing of the fiction and its interpretation in Gorgone. At the same time, several different narrators appear in the novel, who, by multiplying the author's instances, direct the reception by determining the power of the subject of the narration. On the first, fundamental fable level, a heterodiegetic narrator appears, and on the second, the character of the Author, who draws the reader into the very act of writing of Perzeida, ‘a poem without a cause’. In this pseudo-epic that simulates extempore performance circumstances, (pseudo)autobiographical episodes are inserted in which the author's intentions are successively expressed and questioned. However, due to the absence of thematic or motivational connections with the unfolding of the story, with intrusive allegorical potentials of the mythical text, it is clear from the beginning that the author of Perzeida directs and controls the interpretation of Gorgone as a whole, which brings the narrator of that level closer to the construct of the implicit author who takes absolute control of the interpretation by disempowering the reader. Brešan, the author, plays with Brešan's Author and Brešan's narrator in a postmodernist game that adopts the thesis of the author's irrelevance, as he declares ‘My name is irrelevant’ while writing Perzeida. Starting from the controversial points of structuralist rejection of the author and intentionality from interpretation, the reconstruction of the author's presence in Gorgone reminds us of ED Hirsch's ‘defense of the author,’ as well as the relevance of the theoretical framework developed by Svetozar Petrović in the 1970s, where the then prevailing advocacy of the semantic autonomy of the text was opposed by understanding the literary work as a ‘three-dimensional dialectical game.’ In order to try to introduce intentionality into the interpretation of Brešan's novel, this paper also opens a complex narratological question of the relationship between the implied author (IA) and the real author (flesh-and-blood person, FBP), including the conclusions Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan and Wolf Schmid made on this issue.
CANONICAL BIOGRAPHIES AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CANON OF DAŠA DRNDIĆ
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 an authoress who “draws” into her narrative space the voices of other authors and authoress, most often 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 Daša Drndić at the same time becomes the object of representation and the subject of mediation. So, to authoress's narrating join other narrators – Danilo Kiš, Bruno Schulz, Aharon Appelfeld, Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Wisława Szymborska, Witold Gombrowicz, Walter Benjamin and others. By treating authors' biographies and their literary texts as equally (un)reliable documents, selected authors are sometimes joined to her text through their literary texts and sometimes directly as participants in the narrative. The paper analyzes three procedures in the function of shaping a separate canon of literary texts: the procedure of fictionalizing authors' biographies, the procedure for multiplying implied authors, and the procedure of fictionalizing an autobiographical subject. While by fictionalizing authors as real historical figures, literary characters are multiplied, by multiplying 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.
Therefore, return to the once abandoned area often becomes possible only as a return to the past. In this paper, the literary theme of exile will be comparatively followed, starting 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"). This 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 chronotope of exile is dealt with at the level of genre, as the major, supreme chronotope that includes or opens space to a series of specific local chronotopes or motifs, 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, chronotopic as 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 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.
IGOR MANDIĆ'S LITERARY CRITICISM AND PROCESSES OF (DE)CANONIZATION IN THE NINETIES
Igor Mandić's literary criticism is firstly approached indirectly, from the perspective of an unstable position of literary criticism in the system of literary science due to the relationship of theory and history, which is often seen and presented as a relationship of an inferior (and not utterly scientific) genre towards the dominant (and prestigious) scientific genres. The split position of a critic, whose right to interpretation with theoretical background is normatively denounced, and yet he is asked for a responsible evaluation in the sense of a prehistorical work which should through suggestion make the work of canonization easier for the historian, brings both critics and theorists to using metaphors by which they define literary criticism as a “dirty work” in the literary field. Standing up for the dignity of literary criticism Mandić has already in his early works stood up to so-called “cabinet-criticism” in the name of his, “fluid” or “practical criticism”. Since from the very beginning the polemic character is a characteristic of Mandić's writing, in a special review of his two distinguished polemics – with Predrag Matvejević in 1915 and with Stanko Lasić in 1991 – paper tries to show the shift from the aesthetically-ideological questions, which occupied him in the seventies, towards the questions of identity and ideology in the nineties. While with Matvejević, seemingly refusing to polemicize about the relationship of high and mass culture, Mandić was determining the competency and subject boundaries of both literary and academic criticism, with Lasi6, considering the relationship towards the contemporary Serbian literature, he has raised the questions about the instability of national canon. In that context the conclusion opens up the topic of the position of foreign writers in the national canon, since after the breakup of Yugoslavia Mandić has dedicated a series of texts to the problematic actualization of this topic – from "The Literary Hangover of Postcommunism" ("Književni mamurluci postkomunizma", 1993) to "ER for Ventilating Croatian Literary Studio Apartment" ("Hitna služba za provjetravanje hrvatske književne garsonijere", 2001).
Ključne riječi: druga tranzicija, radnice, kulturni radnik, heterotopija krize, heterotopija devijacije
THE WORKING CLASS IN THE POST-YUGOSLAV REALITY AND THE REPRESENTATION OF WORKERS IN THE CROATIAN LITERATURE: ON THE BORDERLINE BETWEEN THE HETEROTOPIA OF CRISIS AND OF DEVIATION
In the historical circumstances of the post-Yugoslav era, class solidarity was regarded as the dominant ideological characteristic of the abandoned self-management socialism. Therefore, transition-related discursive practices which excluded the notion of the worker were common on all levels. This ranged from the Croatian 1990s newspeak which introduced the more neoliberal term djelatnik “employe” into the lexicon, to disempowering the worker within the newly-introduced value system dominated by entrepreneurs as the epitome and the driving force of the new society. In this way, workers were fi rst transformed from selfmanagers and producers into ideological Others, and then into actual “former workers”, relocated from being the vital segment of the creative present and representing utopian projections of progress into a retired past. Given all this, it is signifi cant to note that the worker is once again being used in book titles and as a literary character in contemporary literature – in 2014, the return of the worker is notable in Goran Ferčec’s play "Radnice u gladovanju" (Female Workers on Hunger Strike, 2014), and in Viktor Ivančić’s prose stories "Radnici i seljaci" (Workers and Peasants, 2014). Literary representations of workers in these texts are contextualized within a framework of a new utopian desire and in revolt against the monstrously inverted logic of corporate capitalism which transforms humanity into a serious deviation. Special attention is given to the representation of the space of rebellion taking into consideration the notion of heterotopia: a nursing home, a prison or a hospital are counter-places where the transition-related reality played its cruel game with the “former” worker and the destroyed potentials that it created in his/her projections of the future.
Keywords: the second transition, female workers, cultural workers, the heterotopia of crisis, the heterotopia od deviation
regarded by Žižek as a kind of inverted racism which is allowed when comparing "tolerant" Europe to Balkan Otherness.
This essay approaches Animal's People as an example of a posthumanistic novel, in particular as it questions the relations between the human and the nonhuman (contained already in the title) and between the rational and the irrational (by giving up narration to an irrational voice). The notion of posthumanism is derived from postmodernist critics such as François Lyotard, Stuart Sim and Terry Eagleton, who generally speaking share a conviction that we live in a post-humanistic world, where humanistic ideals are not acceptable any more. Besides they are sceptical about human virtues, expressing doubts particularly about the power of reason, and emphasizing above all ethical disadvantages of rationality.
In addition to that, the idea of "heterotopias" presented in Michel Foucault's article "Of Other Spaces" (1967) is the starting point of interpretation of space and time in Sinha's novel. In distinction from utopias and dystopias which are fundamentally unreal spaces, Foucault considers heterotopias as real places, as counter-sites in which all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented and inverted. In this essay the concept of heterotopia is linked with Indian slums or bidonvilles referred in the Sinha's novel as "The Kingdom of the Poor" in Khaufpur (meaning "Horror Town" in Hindi), where people live in extreme poverty suffering from after-effects of the poison caused by the chemical factory's fallout. The slums constitute heterotopias in the sense that they figure as discriminated monstrous zones where society removes and hides its abhorrent poverty, creating enclosed and isolated places. Those discriminated zones function simultaneously as "inner pockets" of resistance and as a mirror- image of the society which has created it. Since heterotopia is linked with time, it signals an absolute break from traditional time, thus creating heterochrony. In that sense, as a kind of heterotopia of indefinitely accumulating time, we also find heterochrony in Khaufpuri slums where, as an afterlife, time ceases to have meaning turning into an eternal "now". After "that night" had happened, the catastrophe cancelled time and created an eternity of suffering and agony. The signs of apocalyptical time in Sinha's novel are punctuated by frequent quotations from the Book of Revelation, but also with allusions on Ḳayāmat as the Hinduistic idea of the annihilation. To that chain of apocalyptical subtexts of the novel, one should add Dante's Inferno and the concept of the nine circles of Hell represented by two events, both connected with fire, fever, mortification and mental agony – "Nautapa" (nine days of extreme heat) and "Ashara Mubarak" (the night of the fire walk, after nine days of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar).
Since hybridity of the apocalyptic religious signs correlates with the hybrid language of the novel, at the end of this essay the issue of such a mixed language describing is addressed labelling it as "hinglish" (mixture of Hindi and English), "hinçais" (mixture of Hindi and French), and "franglais" (mixture of French and English), respectively.
Današnja emisija (27.03.2017.) posvećena je najnovijim istraživanjima na području književne genologije. Autorica eseja, doktorica komparativne književnosti Miranda Levanat-Peričić, u tekstu pod naslovom "Čitanje distopije iz aspekta različitih teorija žanra: Pavličić, Suvin, Frow" problematizira književnu genologiju s posebnim naglaskom na aspekte znanstvene fantastike. Premise istraživanja dovode pitanja književnih vrsta i žanrova u vezu s pitanjem književnoga kanona, te prikrivenih relacija futurističkih i pasatističkih privida pojedinih, navodno kodificiranih pa i okamenjenih, književnih oblika. Jedno je od ključnih pitanja u kojoj je mjeri distopijski roman, iako prividno zagrnut futurističkim ruhom, zapravo okrenut prema prošlosti. Stoga je distopijska poetika usmjerena na prevrednovanje, a studija Mirande Levanat-Peričić u tom kontekstu i sama nudi prevrednovanu definiciju distopijskoga romana kao književnoga oblika.
http://radio.hrt.hr/ep/citanje-distopije-iz-aspekta-razlicitih-teorija-zanra/195542/
Trag koji je na književne reprezentacije ostavio navedeni diskursivni obrazac čudovišnosti, u ovom se radu prati od izabranih tekstova mezopotamske književnosti (Enki i Kur, Lugale, Angin, Inanna i Ebih, Gilgameš, Anzu i Enuma Eliš). Pritom se u poglavlju o mezopotamskim čudovištima nešto više pažnje posvećuje općim značajkama mezopotamske književnosti, zbog osebujne i dosad slabo proučene građe, kao i zbog prijevoda koji su nastajali za potrebe ovoga rada.
Uz upletenost etnocentričnog svjetonazora znatna je i uloga religijskog diskursa u percipiranju čudovišnosti drugih. U tom su smislu osobito važne demonološke predodžbe koje se razvijaju u odnosu prema religiji koja pripada drugima. Tim se pitanjima bavi drugo poglavlje, posvećeno Starom zavjetu, osobito ranim jahvističkim predodžbama o odnosu božanskog i demonskog (Kraljevi, Suci). Također, iz Starog zavjeta izabrani su ulomci Psalama, proročkih tekstova i Knjige o Jobu u kojima se spominju čudovišta Rahab, Levijatan i Behemot. Uglavnom se analizira starozavjetna demonologija koncentrirana oko figure Rahaba.
Treće poglavlje počinje uvodom u eurocentrično poimanje čudovišnosti. Analiza "etnogeneze" čudovišta polazi od razlike u Herodotovoj i Plinijevoj optici predočavanja Skita obzirom na njihovu čudovišnost. Zatim se pristupa demonološkom antičkom nasljeđu srednjeg vijeka, a razvoj demonoloških koncepcija najprije se promatra kroz odnos Plutarhova djela De genio Socratis prema Apulejevu djelu De deo Socratis, koje predstavlja interpretatio romana grčke demonologije, a zatim se, kao interpretatio christiana antičke demonologije u cjelini, u analizu uključuje Augustinovo djelo O državi Božjoj. Preuzimajući materijal "poganskih povijesti", odnosno temu "čudovišnih ljudskih rodova" iz Plinijeva Prirodopisa to je djelo razvilo osebujnu antropologiju prožetu kršćanskim duhom. Polazeći zatim od ulomaka iz Etimologija Izidora Seviljskog nastoji se pokazati kako se u teološkoj refleksiji izgradio osebujan srednjovjekovni semiotički sustav čudovišnosti. Pri kraju se ovog poglavlja, u kontekstu razvoja diskursa otpora prema ženskoj senzualnosti, sagledava uklapanje straha od ženskog tijelu u okvir srednjovjekovne opsesije demonima.
Utjecanje pretkršćanske predaje u rano kršćanstvo anglosaskog srednjovjekovlja, te njihovo stapanje u hibridnim mitološkim predodžbama o Grendelu i njegovoj majci, prati se u zasebnom poglavlju posvećenom Beowulfu. Susret "poganske" predaje i kršćanstva analizira se u kontekstu patrijarhalnog ratničkog svijeta predstavljenog u epu.
U poglavlju "Postkolonijalni Shakespeare i čudovišnost" interpretirane su drame Mletački trgovac, Othello i Oluja iz aspekta čudovišnosti dramskih likova Shylocka, Othella i Kalibana. Daje se osvrt na relevantnu postkolonijalnu interpretaciju Shakespearea, osobito uzimajući u obzir izazov "središnjeg mjesta" koje bard zauzima u zapadnoj kulturi.
U zaključnom poglavlju obrazlaže se najprije mitološki model u kojemu čudovište predstavlja kategoriju posredovanja između načela reda (Kozmos) i načela nereda (Kaos). Zatim se izlaže etnocentrični model čudovišnosti u kojemu se čudovišnost bića o kojima je bilo riječi u ovom monstruariju, pokušava usustaviti obzirom na znakove čudovišnosti iskazane u prostoru koji nastanjuju (ili iz kojega potječu), obilježjima jezika/govora, tijelu, prehrani i porijeklu, iščitavajući u tim znakovima prekomjernost (u višku ili nedostatku) u odnosu na vladajuću konstrukciju ljudskosti.
INTRODUCTION TO THE MONSTER THEORY: FROM HUMBABA TO CALIBAN
The phenomenon of monstrosity in this book is dealt with as a form of discourse, and under the morphology of monstrosity, the components which make up discursive monstrosity – the body, diet and habitat, that is origin – are analyzed and interrelated. The main characteristic of the afore-mentioned components is their binary structure – the monstrous area is established as the edge of the world opposed to the centre; the monstrous food is inhuman, in its extreme form even cannibalistic; the monstrous language from the beginnings of eurocentricity is a "barbarian language", bestial, incomprehensible non-language opposed to the language of the cultural centre; the monstrous hybrid body is poisonous, infectious, religiously undisciplined and thus is opposed to the homogenous being, clean in the religious and ethnic sense. According to Cohen's definition, the signs of monstrosity are seen as immoderate (either excess or lack of something) in relation to the governing construction of humanity. The trace which the afore-mentioned discursive form of monstrosity left on literary representations is followed in the selected fragments of Mesopotamian and Norhwest Semitic (Ugaritic and Hebrew) narrative poems, over demonological conceptions of the middle Ages, toward the spilling over the pre-Christian traditions into the early Christianity of the Anglo-Saxon Middle Ages, and their fusion into the hybrid mythological conceptions in Beowulf. The last chapter is dedicated to "Postcolonial Shakespeare and Monstrosity".