Yugoslav Responsibility II: Taking a Stand: Culture, Commitment, and Critique

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

More so than most, Yugoslav literature requires us to take a stand. Even to claim the existence of a distinctly Yugoslav literature, rather than a set of competing national canons or some amorphous transnational corpus, involves theoretically and politically charged commitments — particularly when it comes to Yugoslav literature that persists despite the destruction of the federal Yugoslav state in the 1990s. Assuming just such a stance, the papers in this panel investigate moments in the work of major authors in the Yugoslav tradition — Miroslav Krleža, Dubravka Ugrešić, and Dušan Jovanović among them — whose interpretation hinges on the position taken up by their readers. We propose that an adequate comprehension of these moments requires a radical critique of present conditions, not to arrive at a state of pessimistic resignation, but for the sake of asserting the concrete possibility of superseding the present. Thus, for the participants in this panel, taking a stand is both a necessary precondition of critical scholarly engagement and a bid to bring literature to bear on its social reality. The latter is possible because the standpoint called for here, while necessarily subjective, is nonetheless immanent to the object of its critique. In our efforts to rethink Yugoslav literature, we confront a challenge inherent in the tradition of dialectical thinking: to be, as Adorno memorably stated in Minima Moralia, “at every moment in the matter and outside of the matter” simultaneously.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Maša Kolanovic, U of Zagreb (Croatia)

Papers

• Socializing Naturalism in Krleža's Croatian God Mars - Dominick Lawton, Stanford U

• The Yugoslav Praxis School on the Autonomy of Art - Kathryn Coyne, UC Berkeley

• War and Representation: On The Balkan Trilogy by Dušan Jovanović - Gregor Moder, U of Ljubljana (Slovenia)

• The Ministry of Pain and the Theology of Hell - Djordje Popovic, UC Berkeley

Discussant

• Myka Tucker-Abramson, U of Warwick (UK)