Not Looking at a Coffee Mug: Bosnian-Herzegovinian, Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Literatures as Postcolonial Polycentric Literary Polysystems (original) (raw)

2019, Jugoslovenska književnost: prošlost, sadašnjost i budućnost jednog spornog pojma / Yugoslav Literature: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Notion, ed. by Adrijana Marčetić, Bojana Stojanović Pantović, Vladimir Zorić, Dunja Dušanić, Beograd: Čigoja štampa

The purposefully ugly title of my paper points to two frameworks within which I propose to discuss the construction of three literary systems whose existence has, for various reasons, been contested, and which cannot be called "national"in any straightforward sense of the word. Bosnian (or, to be more precise, Bosnian-Herzegovinian), Yugoslav, and Post-Yugoslav literatures seem to be, at this particular point in time, to a greater or lesser degree, cultural and political orphans; and yet, some literary texts and phenomena can scarcely be understood without at least hypothesising those contexts. The two theoretical frameworks which could enable the methodological stabilisation of those contexts for the purposes of understanding the complexities of literary texts and phenomena are Svetozar Petrović"s suggestion that "our literatures" can best be understood as structurally similar in their historical development to the literatures of other colonised nations (rather than to the major European national literatures, such as French or English), and Itamar Even-Zohar"s idea of literary polysystems. Both Petrović and Even-Zohar provide us with theoretical concepts to analyse literary systems which contain marked differences between the centre (or several centres) and the margins (or even several degrees of margin), and include multilingualism as part of their corpus, all of which can be applied to all three polysystems, even though I shall mainly focus on the comparison between the Bosnian-Herzegovinian and the Yugoslav one.