Many a Footnote and Afterword: Dubravka Ugrešić and the Essay

Téa Rokolj

doi:10.16995/olh.202

Abstract

A widely translated author, and a prominent voice from post-communist Europe, Dubravka Ugresic has published a variety of literary forms in addition to literary criticism and translations. Playful experimentation with language, boundaries between texts, and literary conventions as well as an acute awareness of the contemporary socio-political context in which her own texts come to be are among the notable features of her writing. It is her essays, however, that invite a closer look at the interstices between the author and the narrator, the world and the text(s). From her early-1990s essays that were critical of the nationalist discourses of former Yugoslavia and which precipitated her exile through her more recent writing that engages with broader political and cultural questions, Ugresic has come to embody a public intellectual and transnational writer. I argue that her choice of the essay as the literary form allows her to transcend these two identities, however fluid, and provides her with discursive authority and agency. Cognizant of its legacy and its expressive possibilities, Ugresic continuously revisits the essay, and, at times, moves it into the realm of theoretical fiction. I shall focus on Ugresic’s more recent work – the essays from Karaoke Culture, Europe in Sepia and Pescanik .

Highlights

While she no longer lives in the country of her birth – Croatia ( Yugoslavia) – and resides in Amsterdam, Dubravka Ugrešić (b. 1949) continues to write in Croatian
This playful, experimental approach to literary creation, and an import of Russian formalism are evident in her subsequent work – both the short stories and the novels
‘Spying on the everyday is half a writer’s job; the rest is creative filtering of the information gleaned’ (Ugrešić, 2014: 111). This idea of mediated experience and selective attention, as represented by the screen metaphor, dovetails with the underpinnings of the essay as an exploratory, provisional literary form. As she engages with questions of representation of reality and the representation/ performance of identity, Ugrešić opts for a literary form that, from its very origins tends toward experimentation and self-reflection

Summary

Introduction

While she no longer lives in the country of her birth – Croatia ( Yugoslavia) – and resides in Amsterdam, Dubravka Ugrešić (b. 1949) continues to write in Croatian. David Williams, who in addition to authoring a critical study has translated the most recent two collections of Ugrešić’s essays, acknowledges the importance of literary and cultural essays by East European writers such as Ugrešic, Milan Kundera, Christa Wolf or Joseph Brodsky.6 He observes that they ‘have all written of east European literature and culture with an intellectual firepower and aesthetic élan often unrivalled by literary scholarship itself’ (2013: 26).7 Such a statement, suggests a view of the essay as a self-explanatory, argumentative or nonfiction text rather than a literary form that warrants closer attention.

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Conclusion