Rethinking Yugoslav Culture IV: What is Yugoslav Literature Today?

Session Submission Type: Lightning Round

Brief Description

What is Yugoslav literature today? Should the term simply relate to the literary corpus created in the country that once bore this name? Or is it a designation for an even narrower group of Yugoslav works, those able to withstand expropriation by national literatures? This assumes that Yugoslav literature existed in the past. Did it? There was no consensus even in Yugoslav times, when several interpretive frameworks--synthetic, supranational, comparative--competed with those that simply denied the possibility of Yugoslav culture.

Can there be Yugoslav literature today without a Yugoslav state? If so, where and how? Is it confined to a transnational status, belonging to no particular place or language? What social and aesthetic features bind works of Yugoslav literature together? And, crucially--who should be deciding on these designations and classifications: authors themselves, critics, scholars, readers, or…? Can “Yugoslav literature” be left to “language games,” whereby the term is defined solely by the context of its use, designating different things in different contexts?

These and related questions about the nature of Yugoslav literature are posed with increased frequency in cultural and scholarly debates in and beyond the region. That literature is at the crux of these contemporary discussions is nothing new: literature has played a fundamental role in the creation of imagined communities. In the case of supranational Yugoslavia, debates about literature were closely linked both to the formation of the socialist state and its violent demise. This roundtable will address the importance of literature to the future of Yugoslav political forms. This panel hopes to contribute to the field of New Yugoslav Studies.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 21st Century

Chair

• Ena Selimovic, Independent Scholar

Papers

• Specters of Yugoslavia - Vladislav Beronja, U of Texas at Austin

• In Search of the Lost Futures - Gordana Crnkovic, U of Washington

• Post-Yugoslav Literature as a Regional, Multilingual Literature - Samantha Farmer, U of Michigan

• Viennese Yugoslav Literature - Miranda Jakisa, U of Vienna (Austria)

• Kosovar Writing in Yugoslav Literature - Genta Nishku, US Holocaust Memorial Museum

• Something’s Missing: Yugoslav Literature from the Standpoint of Redemption - Djordje Popovic, UC Berkeley