The Feminist Book Club 2

09.11.2023

Daša Drndić: Canzone di guerra: nove davorije, 1997.
Dubravka Ugrešić: Kultura laži: antipolitički eseji, 1996.

9. 11. 2023.

In the first session dedicated to Croatian and (Post)Yugoslav literature, we discussed Daša Drndić (1946–2018) and Dubravka Ugrešić (1949–2023), two authors with different poetics but similar status in the national and international literary scene. Both the novel and the essay we read were published in the second half of the 1990s, when everyday and cultural life were characterized by the war and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, as well as the establishment of new values and norms. Migration and exile as a result of political circumstances have certainly left deep traces in the literary work of both authors. While Daša Drndić moved from Belgrade to Rijeka (1992) and then to Canada (1995) in the early 1990s and returned to Rijeka in 1997, Dubravka Ugrešić left Croatia for good in 1993 and lived and worked in Amsterdam. In their works, both authors problematize a number of social phenomena that became visible in the 1990s, such as growing nationalism, xenophobia, violence and fascism. Both also took a particularly dissident position in relation to the social and cultural revision of the 1990s and built up this position precisely through their writing.

Questions we discussed in the club:

• What thematic and historical layers can be identified in the novel Canzone di guerra?
• How does the linguistic inadequacy of the narrator and her daughter manifest itself?
• What levels of class analysis can be identified?
• How do the reminiscences of the past appear?
• What types of texts do we find in the novel?
• What is the connection between writing and exile?
• What kind of comments does the narrator make about the current literary field?

With this question, we connect the novel with the essay collection The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays by Dubravka Ugrešić, i.e. with the selected essay Good night, Croatian writers, wherever you are. We discussed the following essay topics:

• writing as a privileged activity in relation to circumstances
• the specificity of the artistic message
• what role does origin play in literary communication?
• is there a literary nation?
• the question of the responsibility of the writer and the individual in the collective.

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