Sections offered FALL 2021:
#23159 |
MARINA ANTIC |
MW 1:10-2:25pm |
BH 231 |
CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; meets with SLAV-S 320
Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html
In a whirlwind of macabre and magical moments, post-Yugoslav literary works tell of a world coming apart at the seams. Here Hemingway and Karl Marx share compromising moments, soccer games are played for people’s lives, illegal immigrants working in Amsterdam red light district sweatshops earnestly study literature, Hare Krishna followers volunteer for military service at the front, war refugees find work as Greenpeace activists on the streets of Chicago… It is a world that disintegrates and comes together in the most improbable of ways: historical and counterfactual, violent and uproarious, dark and jovial all at the same time.
This course is an exploration of a peculiar literary universe that exists across multiple countries in the Balkans, from the early 1990s into the present. Its works are written in multiple languages of the former common Yugoslav state and many of its authors reside in voluntary or involuntary exile in the region and across the world. It is a literature born in the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s, united by its common Yugoslav past and its multilingual, multicultural, and transnational existence since.
We will read a selection of the most well-known works from this region from the last thirty years and explore whether this fragmentary, diverse, exilic and yet homebound literature forms a united literary tradition or whether its differences outweigh its common origins. We will situate its origin in Yugoslav socialist modernism, explore the effects nationalist violence and wars of Yugoslav succession have had on this literary culture, and trace how history, memory, trauma, war, and exile appear in these texts. More broadly, our work will trace common themes and preoccupations, the range of aesthetic expressions, and divergences and varieties of its genres and forms.
At the end of this course, students will have become familiar with the major literary works of the last thirty years in the countries of former Yugoslavia. They will learn to critically assess the historical and social context of a given text, identify and analyze a variety of literary traditions it belongs to, and trace, compare, and critically assess common themes and tropes among these works.