CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Ilic, Dejan Dragoljub |
|---|---|
| Title | WAR OF WORDS AND WORDS FOR WAR. Nationalism and masculinity in the field of Serbian literature in the 1970s and the 1980s |
| Summary | This thesis identifies and critically analyzes the prevailing patterns of the cultural self-understanding of the Serbian society, and its members (that is, individuals who identify themselves as Serbs), in the last decades of the twentieth century. It focuses on value systems, symbols, memories, myths, and traditions that have been articulated within the field of Serbian literature, in order to answer the following question: How come that the Serbian political elite responded to the "national question," raised by disintegration of the Yugoslav federal state, in a manner that was thoroughly permeated by utterly ethnicized discourse with a strong notion of self-victimhood? Although it rejects a direct causal link between culture and politics, this thesis demonstrates that both national literature and its history at the same time produce and legitimize certain traditions as a possible subject of attachment and identification. Therefore, within my thesis, a field of literature is treated as an arena in which identity politics compete against each other. This competition is characterized as war of words; accordingly, works of literature and literary criticism are seen as arsenals of images, symbols, and concepts of belonging, which are used in a rivalry for political domination. The thesis approaches the late twentieth-century Serbian literature from the perspective of the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia and armed conflicts that proceeded it, claiming that the grave wrongdoings of the Serbian side in these wars give enough reasons to designate Serbian culture as a culture of accomplices. Therefore, although the thesis circulates across disciplines and uses various concepts tied to different fields and theories, the concept of transitional justice, with its specific cultural aspect, overarches the research. Categories of gender and ethnicity are used in depicting particular elements of collective self-understandings discerned in the works of Serbian narrative literature, literary criticism and historiography. The particular ethical dimension of these elements, that is, their inclusive and exclusive mechanisms, delineate Serbian culture and ethnicity as the objects of research in this work. |
| Supervisor | Lukic, Jasmina |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/gphild01.pdf |
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