Mapping of Post-Yugoslav Literary Exile: Aleksandar Hemon, Dubravka Ugrešić, David Albahari
CSEES
UNI GRAZ
brownbag seminar
Location:
Resowi, SR 15.33, Bauteil B, 3 OG.
Date:
Tuesday, 10 January, 2017 – 13:00 to 14:00
Speaker(s): Iva Kosmos
Description:
In the 1990s a number of writers emigrated from ex-Yugoslavia because of the war and found permanent residence in the so-called West. I carried out three case studies on authors that present different possibilities of writing in (and about) exile and emigration. Aleksandar Hemon (1964), originally from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, lives in Chicago and writes in English as a Bosnian-American writer. Dubravka Ugrešić (1949) left Zagreb and rejected any attachment to Croatian national literature and community, but is highly admired in the international field. David Albahari (1948), in contrast to both of them, is only physically present in Canada, while his writing as well as his literary and public activity are mostly connected to his native Serbia. These writers are marked by a similar historical context: the common experience of living in socialist Yugoslavia, ethnic war, political instability and the dissolution of a country, and a departure to Western countries with political democracies and capitalist economic systems. In spite of noted similarities each made different literary and career choices. My main thesis is that differences in their literary works as well as their public appearance and the role they have in society are not to be understood outside of the literary field in which they function. Every writer acts in a certain literary field, and as such responds to different rules, conditions of cultural production and cultural codes that govern the field. That is why I study Hemon as a part of the American literary field, Albahari as a part of the Serbian literary field, and Ugrešić as a part of the international literary field.