Abstract
This article explores the crisis of modernity using the example of Dževad Karahasan’s novel Nocno vijece (The Night Council), a work of literature thematising war crimes committed in the name of nationalism during the 1990s in Yugoslavia. By comparing the specific compositional features of this novel with the general formal and ideological tendencies of crime fiction as such, our analysis establishes that the ethical foundations of contemporary civilisation along with the modern notion of justice as mirrored by the genre of the detective novel are, in the case of Nocno vijece (The Night Council), treated as questionable. Belonging to the line of critique that observes modernity as a state of permanent crisis, this novel betrays the standard conventions of the criminalist genre, thereby contesting the modern era’s prevalent idea of justice by reflecting on the complexity of ethical order in human society.
Highlights
This article explores the crisis of modernity using the example of Dževad Karahasan’s novel Noćno vijeće (The Night Council), a work of literature thematising war crimes committed in the name of nationalism during the 1990s in Yugoslavia
Despite being composed according to several conventions of a detective novel, with the main protagonist compelled to prove his innocence regarding a series of puzzling murders that took place after his homecoming in the town of Foča, there are yet several indications that Dževad Karahasan’s novel Noćno vijeće (The Night Council) can be interpreted as a piece of literature that deals with what might be defined as the crisis of modernity
Certain critics have attempted to proclaim Noćno vijeće a novel likewise contaminated with nationalism based on an ‘anti-Serbian’ sentiment for the way it treated the topic of war crimes committed in the name of Serbian nationalism, whereas the interpretative possibility, namely, that nationalist ideologies of the 1990s in Yugoslavia were taken as a mere symptom of a more fundamental rupture in our modern age, was largely neglected, if not tendentiously excluded in advance
Summary
This article explores the crisis of modernity using the example of Dževad Karahasan’s novel Noćno vijeće (The Night Council), a work of literature thematising war crimes committed in the name of nationalism during the 1990s in Yugoslavia.
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