Post-Yugoslav War Literature and the Paradox of Division in the Name ...

Abstract: 

Post-Yugoslav war literature has not only to cope with basic issues such as trauma, violence and death, but it has to deal with a peculiar paradox that seems to be constitutive for nationalistic civil wars: The disruption of unity in the name of unity, i.e. the disruption of one state in the name of the unity of smaller single nation-states which had constituted that state before. Focusing on Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literary texts that have been written after the Yugoslav war of the 1990s, I will explore how they handle the experience of the laceration of war.I will explore how war literature copes with the fact that a state, i.e. an internationally recognized sovereign state, and a social community of interests and affects, has been split by means of an armed conflict so that small nations could be founded on the basis on ethno-nationalistic principles. Whereas some Post-Yugoslav literary works seem to depict this disruption as a necessary, though appalling breakthrough, I argue that aesthetically complex and multifaced works generally tend to perceive the disruption of a multicultural state as an unconceivable, unnecessary and disastrous breakdown*. To investigate some of these, I will draw upon the concept of the „social imaginary“ (Cornelius Castoriadis) as well as on critical studies on (Yugoslav) nation(alism), war and literature (Nicole Loraux, Ugo Vlaisavljević, Enver Kazaz, Aila Demiragić et al.) combining them with the instruments of literary analysis (narratology and stylistics).