CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Krantic, Alma |
|---|---|
| Title | Community Outside Communion: Exile as an Inoperative Community in the Works of Dubravka Ugresic |
| Summary | Abstract The aim of this thesis is to analyze Dubravka Ugrešić’s works: The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and The Culture of Lies from the scope of philosophical theories whose main premises have arisen from the political and social matters of the 20th century and have come to be known as communitarian theories (Nancy, Blanchot, Esposito, Derrida). Ugrešić’s books offer an exceptional insight into Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav communities, identity constructions, and workings of the newly arisen nationalisms. I argue that that exile—which in the two books stands for a position of a voluntary outsider whether inside or outside the nation’s borders—has a potential of creating an alternative community that challenges the organic one based on nationalism. My main focus is the position of an individual as opposed to the organic community. The different aspects of the opposition that I look into include: dismantling Yugoslav and Croatian communities as organic, where the latter is an imitation of the former, the contestation of the organic communities by the means of an alternative narrative, as well as the importance of mobility and transgression of national borders—both literally and symbolically. I argue that exile offers a creative potential for artists that provides them with both a unique perspective on the organic imaginings and an aesthetic gain which enables them to not only articulate their transgressive insights through their artistic medium, but also make it performative, i.e. transgress by the means of their very art. Ugrešić does so by both her fictional and non-fictional narratives. |
| Supervisor | Eliasova, Vera |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/krantic_alma.pdf |
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