„Postjugoslavenska književnost“ – konstrukcija polja
Authors:   ,   https://urn.nsk.hr/urn:nbn:hr:131:060479, Postnikov Boris 
Published: March 2024

The aim of the dissertation is the analytical construction of the post-Yugoslav literary field, understood as a structured socioliterary space that provides a framework for interpreting the literature of ex-Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav authors beyond the scope of national literature as the dominant paradigm of the history of literature. In order to achieve this goal, we preliminarily reject the 'myth of complete rupture' (Lacko Vidulić), i.e. the myth of a break in the history of all (post-)Yugoslav national literatures that coincides with the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, and which different national narratives implicitly rely upon, aiming to retrospectively present local national literatures as victims of Yugoslav cultural policies. Following the concept of an international literary field (Casanova), instead of a chronological break we introduce a structural rupture that divides each individual national literary field in the ex-Yugoslav region in half, structuring them with regards to the antagonism between their constitutive national and international poles. Post-Yugoslav literary field then emerges as a zone of alliances between transnational, anational, and antinational agents, i.e., agents positioned closer to the international pole. Thus understood, the post-Yugoslav literary field is characterized by continuity, as well as discontinuity in relation to the Yugoslav literary field. Continuity is established in relation to the cosmopolitan line of Yugoslav literature, and if we want to emphasize it, we can follow Casanova's idea of the world literary republic and speak of the literary republic of Yugoslavia that exists even after the Yugoslav state disintegrated. On the other hand, if we want to emphasize discontinuity, we primarily consider the transition from a socialist to a capitalist mode of societal organization. In order to ground our research project in previous studies, we reconstruct the somewhat overlooked line of various conceptions of a common Yugoslav literature. This line rests upon two short, but historically pivotal intervals (the period of the creation of the First Yugoslavia at the end of the second decade of the 20th century and the period of far-reaching conflicts inside the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in the 1960s) and four key figures (Pavle Popović and Antun Barac in the first period, and Svetozar Petrović and Sveta Lukić in the second). In this reconstruction, we follow Casanova's thesis about the historical autonomization of national literatures, which we apply to the discipline of history of literature. It becomes apparent that Yugoslav literature gradually achieves autonomy through these conceptions. While in the first period it is predominantly tied to the (failed) project of building the Yugoslav nation, in the second period, with Lukić, it appears as a distinct socioliterary space positioned between national literatures and world literature, and with Petrović, as a socially overdetermined individual and creative vision of the history of common Yugoslav literature which coexists with national visions, but at the same time opposes them. The historiographic tradition that breaks with the concept(s) of Yugoslav literature and leads from Yugoslav literary comparativism in the 1980s to intercultural literary history as the main alternative to histories of ex-Yugoslav national literatures is discarded, as this line of research ultimately remains tied to the national framework. Instead, we adopt the controversial notion of post-Yugoslav literature, rejecting it's main critiques (Milutinović, Brebanović) and aligning with the conceptualization of post-Yugoslav literature as a field (Bourdieu), proposed by Dean Duda. In the context of our work, its main advantage is that, considering the social context of literature, it allows for the rearticulation of former conceptions of Yugoslav literature in a new context. This primarily applies to the concepts of Lukić and Petrović, who in the 1960s moved beyond a national understanding of literature. To apply the Bourdieuvian model to the study of post-Yugoslav literature, we preliminary subject it to a critical analysis, discussing its core concepts (field, capital, habitus) and lateral terminological framework (agents, illusio, different forms of capital, class, hysteresis), and rejecting standard critiques of alleged reductionism in Bourdieu's sociology of literature. It's theoretical reductionism, on the other hand, becomes apparent in the Bourdieu's understanding of economics, which he reduces to market relations. This leads us to a three-fold correction of the Bourdieuvian model: its analytical potentials come to the fore when applied to phenomena beyond strictly defined capitalist class relations, when it considers the economic specificities of the literary field expressed through the concept of 'the double life of writer' (Lahire), and when it reveals structural homologies between the literary text and the literary field as the primary zone of its social contextualization, rather than the entire social field. We argue that this three-fold limitation makes it especially suitable for studying the postYugoslav (literary) condition. Subsequently, we construct the post-Yugoslav literary field on five levels of analysis, as established by Bourdieu and his later interpreter Robert Speller. The first level encompasses the position of the literary field within a broader field of power, and here we identify points of discontinuity between the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav contexts. The second level encompasses relationships within the literary field itself, revealing lines of continuity that connect the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav socioliterary spaces. The third level involves the habitus of literary authors – drawing on Bourdieu's concept of hysteresis, here we analyze continuity-within-the-discontinuity of (post)Yugoslav literature. On the fourth level, formulated by Speller, we encounter literary text and develop an analysis of the specific genre system of post-Yugoslav literature. The fifth level, also coming from Speller, concerns the transnational extension of Bourdieu's model, which establishes relations of literary autonomy and heteronomy not based on an economic axis, but rather on the axis of the division between the national and international poles of the field. Here we complement Casanova's approach with the concepts of relative vertical differentiation (Buchholz) and strategic exoticization (Brouillette). This sets up an analytical perspective that allows us to read post-Yugoslav literature within its social context, in relation to its Yugoslav past and nationally coded contemporaneity, as well as in the global context towards which post-Yugoslav authors are predominantly oriented. The methodology of our approach is then tested through the hystorical reconstruction of the development of post-Yugoslav literature, spanning from the collapse of the common Yugoslav literary field in the late 1980s up to now. We adopt Bourdieuvian concept of the state of the field as the fundamental mechanism of periodization, and distinguish three successive states of the post-Yugoslav literary field that essentially coincide with the decades of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. We find the initial point of the construction of a common field in the initiative to establish the Yugoslav anti-nationalistic Independent Writers group just prior to the state's dissolution. In the 1990s, we identify the first state of field construction through individual initiatives and contacts devoided of a solid infrastructural support. Among the numerous examples, we pay particular attention to the media backlash against six female writers dubbed the 'witches from Rio,' as well as the Nenad Veličković's novel Konačari (1997), short story collection Sarajevski Marlboro (1994) by Miljenko Jergović and David Albahari's novel Gec i Majer (1998). The aughts are characterized by the logic of constructing a field's infrastructure that doesn't rely on the institutions and funding of the newly emerged post-Yugoslav states, which makes it precarious and evidently exposed to the capitalist rearticulation of the literary field relations. In the aughts, special attention is devoted to the founding of Group 99, the essay collection Zabranjeno čitanje (2001) by Dubravka Ugrešić, and the novel Komo (2006) by Srđan Valjarević. The third state of the post-Yugoslav literary field, finally, is characterized by its discursive integration through essayistic and theoretical recognition of the common post-Yugoslav literary space. In the 2010s, we pay special attention to the interpretation of the paradigmatic essay collection Balkansko brvno (2014) by Aleš Debeljak, and the analysis of the authorial trajectories of Rumena Bužarovska and Lana Bastašić, two out of six co-authors of the prominently post-Yugoslav diary collection Dnevnik 2020. (2021) In the conclusion of the dissertation, results of the conducted research are summarized.