Abstracts

for the seminar 'Subverting Master Narratives: New Discourses in Contemporary Greek, Bosnian and Spanish Literature'

Fedja Borčak

Strategies of Infantilisation in Contemporary Bosnian-Herzegovinian Literature

I will present the basic aspects of my current doctoral research, which deals with something I call ”subversive infantilisation” in contemporary Bosnian-Herzegovinian fiction. The term designates a type of counter-discourse characterised by an infantile type of narration that by employing ironic imagery and oversimplification seeks to estrange sedimented experiences and undermine hegemonic forms of representation.

I will show a few literary examples and discuss what potentials and limitations (epistemologically, politically, morally) there might be in this particular discourse.

Dalila Tatarevic

Aesthetic resistance in literary discourses:
A case study of Bosnian and Spanish contemporary literature

Bosnian and Spanish contemporary literature is argued to be ethically engaged literature not only by giving voice to human experience of war but also by claiming its role in a socio-political context fractured by conflicted memories of the traumatic pasts. As sites of memory, literary discourses naturally preserve and reproduce memory of the recent past.

More interestingly, however, is that they also negotiate the legacy left behind by the war thus questioning not only which memory is transmitted but also how it is transmitted; more precisely they question memory processes and modes of remembrance. Through specific narrative strategies – as for instance multiperspectivism, genre hybrids, meta-fictionalization – literary discourses create ethical implications by proposing a reflective and critical approach to the remembrance of the conflicts of past in present.

They invert and shatter the dominant narratives of victim vs. perpetrator // good vs. evil // us vs. them – narratives that keep both the individual and the collective from moving towards healing and reconciliation – with the Other and with the Self. Seen in this perspective, the aesthetics of literary discourses carry the potential for subversive literary experience that can transform subjectivities and create resistance towards reproduction of antagonistic memory mode thus avoiding preservation of enemy lines.

The interplay between the war and memory novels from two different yet so similar contexts might give a more nuanced understanding of the process of identification with, interpretation and internalization of the traumatic experience and memory of it thus giving us a more profound understanding of how we can learn from our pasts. 

Trine Stauning Willert

From the sophisticated to the banal: Narrative strategies in telling “the others’ truths” in contemporary Greek fiction about Turks, Muslims and Ottomans

The hegemonic national narrative about Greeks as victims and Turks as perpetrators has been increasingly challenged since the geo-political changes of 1989 and the Greek-Turkish rapprochements from 1999 to 2008. Several recent historical novels have Ottoman, Muslim or Turkish protagonists, thus approaching events in Greek national history from the perspective of the ancestral enemy.

The paper examines four different narrative strategies of including the viewpoint of the national other in historical novels and considers the relationship between the contemporary context and the historical events and characters.

How persuasive can the representation of the other be and what literary devices do authors use to initiate the reader into the other’s universe? These questions apply to all literature but are there particular circumstances concerning historical fiction in a national context? Does the potential role of literature with regard to modifying or subverting master narratives about the distant and not so distant past depend upon the degree of sophistication of the narrative strategies? What happens to the narrative when the author’s intentions are more or less obvious? And can simplistic national master narratives only be effectively challenged by equally simplistic counter-narratives?