Literary perspectives: Croatia (original) (raw)
Related papers
FROM BOHEMIAN LIFESTYLE TO FEMINIST CONCIOUSNESS: SUNČANA ŠKRINJARIĆ AND YUGOSLAV WOMEN'S WRITING
Knjiženstvo, Journal for Studies in Literature, Gender and Culture, 2024
This article interprets Sunčana Škrinjarić's prose and radio plays in the context of Yugoslav cultural history as well as socialist and contemporary reflections on female authorship (its social significance as well as thematic and stylistic particularities). I reflect on Škrinjarić's trilogy, the novels 'Ulica predaka' [The Street of Ancestors], 'Ispit zrelosti' [The Matriculation Exam], and 'Bijele strijele' [The White Arrows]. In the trilogy, written between 1980 and 2004, Škrinjarić uses autobiographical material to tell the story of Tajana's fraught coming of age and thwarted artistic ambitions. The trilogy sardonically reflects on the male-centered official and counter-cultural canon. While the trilogy is the most comprehensive example of Škrinjarić's recurring preoccupations and character types (ambitious mediocre man, sullen young woman, struggling poet, crazed communist) and also the work in which she first introduced her polyphonic, lyrical style, I argue that she has been exploring the theme of marginality since the 1960s. In the stories 'Jedno ljeto' [One Summer] and 'Trovanje biljkom' [Poisoned by a Plant], the non-normative bodies were finally given a distinctly feminist slant. As her short story 'Mesareva ljubav' [The Butcher's Love] shows, even in the conservative 1990s Škrinjarić was not deterred from criticizing violence against women and the judicial system that facilitated it. The article also reflects on Škrinjarić's lesser-known novel 'Kazališna kavana' [The Theatre Café], a depiction of bohemia in 1950s Zagreb-the liberalism of men was pardoned, while that of women could have led to a horrific and illegal abortion. Finally, Škrinjarić's radio play 'Tamna soba' [The Dark Room], an intersectional representation of various socialist femininities, reflects pessimistically on the erasure of women's oeuvres. These works are placed in a dialogue with scholarship on Yugoslav women writing (Lukić, Zlatar, Lóránd) as well feminist theory (Halberstam) and narratology (Cohn, Rimmon-Kenan).
Post-Yugoslav Serbian Literature and Its Roots in the Social and Political Changes
Transcultural studies, 2018
Post-Yugoslav literature and culture came out of the stylistic formations of Yugoslav modernism and postmodernism, in the context of European cultural discourse. Yugoslav literature, which spans the existence of "two" Yugoslavias, the "first" Yugoslavia (1928-1941) and the "second" socialist Yugoslavia (1945-1990), is the foundation of various national literary and cultural paradigms, which shared the same or similar historical, philosophical and aesthetic roots. These were fed, on the one hand, by a phenomenological understanding of the world, language, style and culture, and on the other, by an acceptance of or resistance to the socialist realist aesthetics and ideological values of socialist Yugoslav society. In selected examples of contemporary Serbian prose, the author explores the social context, which has shaped contemporary Serbian literature, focusing on its roots in Serbian and Yugoslav 20th century (post)modernism.
From (Neo-)Avant-garde to Post-Yugoslav Literature
Slavia Meridionalis
From (Neo-)Avant-garde to Post-Yugoslav LiteratureThis text is a review of Tijana Matijević’s book, entitled From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent. A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature (2020). I situate the book primarily in the field of post-Yugoslav studies, but I also point out how it corresponds to recent developments in certain related fields, such as memory studies. I show how the author makes a creative framework for the study of post-Yugoslav literature by bringing together the concept of écriture feminine, writings about Yugoslavia’s past and the war, and the Yugoslav (neo-)avant-gardist heritage. Od (neo)awangardy do literatury postjugosłowiańskiejPublikacja stanowi recenzję książki From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent. A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature autorstwa Tijany Matijević (2020). Pracę Matijević lokuję przede wszystkim w obszarze studiów postjugosłowiańskich, zwracając uwagę także na to, jak koresponduje ona z najnowszymi osiąg...
Croatian Tales of Long Ago: Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić's Covert Autobiography
All Equally Real: Femininities and Masculinities Today / Pilinska, Ana i Siganporia, Harmony, Brill Pblishing , 2019
Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić is the first women accepted as a member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts and one of the finest writers ever to have written in Croatian language. Being born into a politically prominent family, she accepted the ideals of her circle and enthusiastically endeavoured to fulfil her duties determined by the patriarchal values she idealized as inherently ethical. Writing was not among the duties for well bred ladies, so, to be able to write and still comply with what she considered to be her role, she had to find a form of writing compatible with the role of woman. Since motherhood is the essence of femininity in patriarchy, and since storytelling is what mothers do, writing fairytales could be understood as a compromise between what she should and shouldn't do as a woman, between the essentially masculine act of writing and essentially feminine act of teaching her children language and values through storytelling. Even if in the choice of genre she was not rebellious, and avoided the confrontation with the masculine authority by not interfering with his realm of the public sphere, but conforming to the privacy of family life and literature, the history of her inner struggle to find creative outlet, to emancipate from limitations imposed on her gender is still central to her work. On the manifest level her fairy tales promote the dominant ethical values, but the subtext, the hidden conflicts and their resolutions tell an entirely different story, the story of the emancipation of her Self from the authority of the masculine. Her creative strategy, the interplay of the manifest and the latent, the simultaneous divinization and the rejection of the patriarchal, the subtle subversion of the masculine authority are what this paper intends to discuss, thus discussing the gender issues reflected.
This thesis is an examination of enski list, arguably the first magazine published exclusively for women between the wars in Croatia, and Yugoslavia. To fully understand the place, meaning and the impact of this magazine on everyday lives of its readers, with the study of the content I also include examination of the role of its editor and the first Croatian woman journalist Marija Jurić Zagorka. Finally, this thesis examines readers' responses to the content, their opinions, interactions between the readers and the editor, as well as interactions between the readers themselves for the overall assessment of the significance of enski list in the history of popular women's press in Croatia, and Yugoslavia. This thesis is a historical project which uses two theoretical approaches to study of media: feminist political economic approach, and the feminist critique of the public sphere. By combining these two theoretical standpoints I illuminated some of the ways in which media par...
The Reception of Canadian Writing in Croatia
Canada Consumed: The Impact of Canadian Writing in Central Europe (1990-2017), 2019
This article will focus on the Croatian reception of what can be provisionally termed as ‘quality’ Canadian writing – specifically, Canadian authors whose full-length works of fiction (CanLit) and non-fiction have been translated into Croatian and published since 1990 and have garnered relevant audiences and received critical attention. We investigate how Canadian writing is perceived by the Croatian audiences and their critical reception, the various cultural and publishing circumstances of their publication and translation, reasons for the selection of particular authors and works, occurrence of potential trends or preferences, and how these can be understood and interpreted compared to the publishing trends of Canadian writing in other Central European countries. Our conclusions will be informed by investigation of critical and general reviews, texts accompanying anthologies, essays, special issues, guest readings and lectures by Canadian authors, as well as interviews with publishers and/or translators.
Outside of a logocentric discourse?: The case of (post)modern Czech women's writing
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses,, 2007
This thesis aims to examine the nature of the relationship between the kind of textual politics, here referred to as a "women's writing", and the dominant discursive practice of our culture, whose logic and functioning is best encapsulated in the Derridean term "phallogocentrism". Women's writing, then, is here defined as that kind of writing which locates itself outside the domain and logic of a phallogocentric discourse, trying to challenge and undermine its hegemonic status. In this respect, women's writing is not delimited by the sex of an author, but by his/her gendered subjectivity, by his/her position within the discursive formation and his/her attitude to hegemonic language practices. Thus, besides the Czech writers Milada SouSkova, VSra Linhartova, Sylvie Richterova and Daniela Hodrova, the writing of a male author Bohumil Hrabal has been also introduced into the thesis. Women's writing, as understood in this thesis, a) critically reflects upon the role o f language as a decisive medium for our thinking b) questions the notion of subjectivity, which is usually equalled with the Descartean Ego and is conceived as an autonomous and sovereign entity. The authors discussed here are aware that we all are inevitably "inserted" into language. Therefore, they highlight the formative role of language by means of an ironic, palimpsest-like rewriting of conventional literary narratives, as well as by means of textual politics defined by a constant displacement of meaning. The critique of the phallogocentric concept of subjectivity is on the one hand informed by the decentering of the identity of the narrating subject, and on the other by one's awareness of one's epistemic situatedness within a particular discursive space. The process of language mediation within women's writing as I see it takes the form of a radical reassessment of conventional genres such as, for example, autobiography. Within the autobiographical texts discussed here, fragmented topologies of memory provide an ambiguous space for an attempted integration of a discontinuous identity. Women's writing also highlights the fact that "Otherness" remains unintelligible within the logic and practice of the hegemonic phallogocentric discourse. The logic and economy of women's writing is determined by the tension between its drive towards non-phallogocentric discourse, and its paradoxical, yet inevitable dependence on symbolic codes and hegemonic discursive practices. The 2 i v i r i m u i c a i d , J c tu i v ic u u n u n a subversive potential of women's writing, as understood here, is thus not situated within a space seen as a radical "beyond" or "outside", but it is directed inwards, into the fissures of the phallogocentric discourse itself.