유고슬라비즘의 헤테로토피아

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the principal aspects of so called ʺPost-Yugoslav Metafictionʺ on the base of the heterotopic images described in postmodern writings by major post-Yugoslavian writers, Vladimir Arsenijevic’s The Hold, David Albahari’s Bait, Vladimir Tasic’s The Farewell Gift, Sasa Stanisic’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone? and Aleksandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, The Lazarus Project. Being in succession to the legacy of the literary sources of former Yugoslavia, post‐Yugoslav metafictions reveal the constant existential, paradoxical problems and ideological dilemmas in which todayʹs Western Balkans are seen to be entangled, while reappropriating those as their literary materials. The writers of post‐Yugoslav metafictions describe the real face of the national imaginary in that area, and analyze the multilayered structure of the existential absurdity with focus on tribal nationalism, premodern ethos, provincialism through the literary method of self-alienation. Secondly, I inquired into the dialogic connection between the former Yugoslav writers and post‐Yugoslav writers of the younger generation. Through this categorization of writers of different generations according to their literary tendencies, I think it is possible to propose the new version of Yugoslav literary history. Thirdly, the study of the heterotopic images of these new writings helps us see the significance of the so-called ʺwriting of disasterʺ as an element of postmodern artistic devices. This new, non-Balkan, irregular artistic structure needs to be examined considering the political implication of the fact that post-Yugoslav literary works seem to function as a kind of counter-narratives against the traditional narratives that have often been appropriated as means of nationalistic propaganda. Conclusionally, I tried to analyse the positive connotation of the heterotopic images embodied in the avangardistic aspects of post-Yugoslav metafictions which are concerned with both the representation of reality and writers’ self-representation. Through this analysis we can draw a definite meaning of the heterotopic images of Yugoslavism proposed by those younger writers as an alternative to current political dilemmas from the fact that post-Yugoslav metafictions critically deal with both the external responses to the current affairs in the Western Balkan countries and the internal attitudes among the civil societies of that region.