dunja dušanić

This article examines the relationship between poetry and testimony in order to outline a viable framework for interpreting testimonial poetry (or “poetry of witness,” in Carolyn Forché’s terms) as a literary genre in its own right. Neglected in favor of other, mimetically oriented modes of witnessing, especially those in narrative fiction and documentary prose, testimonial poetry has not been extensively studied, and when it has, the studies were often based on inadequate notions of testimony that fail to recognize witnessing as a broader social and linguistic practice. Relying on the sociological approach to eyewitness testimony developed by Renaud Dulong (notably in Le témoin oculaire [1998]), this article proposes a new understanding of poetic testimony, based neither on an overly broad notion of witnessing as living through an event or era, nor on a narrow understanding of witnessing as providing a faithful documentary account of a personal experience. Much like its prose counterpart, poetic testimony enacts a quasi‐contractual relationship between authors and readers, whereby the former are committed to telling the truth about a directly experienced event of public importance and the latter, in return, are committed to considering seriously their words, approaching them in good faith. This relationship is driven by an underlying ethical imperative whereby the author acts as a moral witness in Avishai Margalit's sense of the term, and the readers assume the role of a moral community sympathetic to their plight. By referencing examples from American, Hungarian, Russian, French, Polish, and South Slavic twentieth‐century poetry, the article shows how a “testimonial” reading of a poem, often very strongly favored on intuitive grounds, modifies generic expectations based on traditional poetic genres and explores its interpretative and ethical implications.

This article explores the long and complex genesis of the only authorized, English version of Rastko Petrović's seminal First World War novel Dan šesti (The Sixth Day). By relying on new, previously unpublished materials from Petrović's manuscript collection and by comparing the successive stages of his struggle to represent the traumatic experience of the war, it seeks to cast a new light on his reasons for abandoning the first known version of this novel (Osam nedelja) and to offer a new, comprehensive view of Petrović's development as a novelist.

This article explores the paradoxical position of Serbian modernist authors, chiefly Ivo Andrić, vis-à-vis Gavrilo Princip. It addresses the discrepancy between the powerful hold that Princip, as a symbolic figure, had on the members of his generation and the absence of literary representations of his act in the literature of the interwar period. A more attentive reading of the texts in which Princip’s act is mentioned or alluded to, shows, however, that he performed an important and highly symbolic function in the modernists’ auto-designation as the members of a new generation of authors.

Art projects designed to commemorate the centenary of World War I,
whether or not officially commissioned, are all part of a national and
global commemorative industry. Although this industry seems infinitely
vast and varied, some of its dominant features stand out, especially when
compared with commemorative efforts and activities marking previous
“important” anniversaries of the Great War (namely, the ten-year and fifty-year anniversary). This paper attempts to provide a rough, and by no means exhaustive, comparative overview of the role of different arts and media in commemorating the centenary of World War I. Our case study is limited to the narrative commemorating the war in UK. In analysing the projects which were initiated independently or commissioned by 14–18 NOW, we focus on films and video-games produced in the UK from 2014–2019: Testament of Youth (James Kent, 2014), They Shall Not Grow Old (Peter Jackson, 2018), 1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019) and 11–11: Memories Retold (2018).

Иако се питање утицаја Првог светског рата на модернизам двадесетих година XX века испоставило као незаобилазно у књижевноисторијским приказима међуратног периода, њему је углавном приступано са позиција које ризикују или да овај однос поједноставе или да га посматрају сасвим уопштено. Пажљивије разматрање поетичких ставова и књижевних остварења писаца који су ступили на сцену у годинама после Првог светског рата открива да је веза између рата и модернизма сложенија, суптилнија и далекосежнија него што би нас нас трагање за доказима непосредних утицаја или за уопштавањима о Zeitgeistu навелo да помислимо. Задржавајући се само на једној теми, распрострањеној у књижевној критици, уметничкој прози, али и јавном дискурсу-идеји о рату као прекиду, који је историју поделио на предратно и послератно доба-покушаћемо да нешто прецизније одредимо улогу коју је Први светски рат имао у формулисању неких од најзначајнијих поетичких начела међуратног модернизма.

What is today’s narratology?

This paper seeks to challenge the triumphalist claim, advanced by David Herman and subsequently widely adopted as the canonical version of narratology’s history, that towards the end of the 20th-century narratology experienced a renaissance, as the so-called ‘classical’ method of narrative analysis was replaced by a variety of ‘postclassical’ approaches. By examining some of the more recent changes in narratology’s object, methods and aims of inquiry, and by focusing in particular on the fate of the notion of narrative, it offers a reassessment of the current state of the discipline.

This article seeks to briefly revisit the connection between World War I and Serbian literary modernism. The argument is that this connection is subtler, deeper and more enduring than it is usually presented. To illustrate it, the literary development of three key writers of Serbian modernism, Miloš Crnjanski, Ivo Andrić and Rastko Petrović, is taken as an example, and their attitudes regarding the literary representation of World War I compared to the actual representations of war in their poetry and fiction.

The proliferation of war novels in the late 1920s and early 1930s divided readership and caused significant controversy. Motivated by the desire to determine the ‘proper’ way of writing the First World War, the many debates on war novels revealed the existence of a deeper crisis of memory which culminated around the first ten-year anniversary of the Armistice. The debates surrounding Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Jean Norton Cru’s study Witnesses (Témoins, 1929) have already received considerable critical attention, but the War Books Controversy was, in many respects, a pan-European phenomenon. A comparative outline is given of the arguments used in the debates that followed the publication of All Quiet on the Western Front in Germany and Witnesses in France. Other illustrations are the controversy in Britain at the beginning of the 1930s, and a later debate, stirred by veterans’ testimonies on the subject of a Serbian war novel of the 1930s, Stevan Jakovljević’s Serbian Trilogy (Srpska trilogija). The War Books Controversy can be seen as the first evidence of a major reconfiguration of the boundaries between fictional and factual narration, whose consequences are keenly felt today in a literary market progressively dominated by ‘faction’.

This study explores the intricate relationship between poetry and testimony with the aim of outlining a viable theoretical framework for the interpretation of testimonial poetry (or “poetry of witness”) as a literary genre in its own right.  Usually neglected in favour of other, mimetically oriented modes of witnessing, especially those in narrative fiction and documentary prose, testimonial poetry has only recently received extensive critical attention (e.g., in the work of Antony Rowland, Poetry as Testimony: Witnessing and Memory in Twentieth-century Poems, 2014). One problem with the majority of the existing studies of poetic testimony is that they either drift towards biography, casting poets as witnesses based on their lived experiences rather than their poetic texts, or, oppositely, opt for a text-centred perspective, which tends, misleadingly, to bracket biographical facts and seek purely textual indicators of testimony. By referencing a number of examples from Serbian, Russian, Hungarian, French, German, Polish, and American 20th century poetry, I opt for a different approach, which aims to avoid the pitfalls of both “biographism” and “textualism”. Relying on speech genre theory and the sociological approach to testimony developed by Renaud Dulong (notably in Le témoin oculaire, 1998), I argue instead that the poetry of witness is based on a testimonial contract between the poet and the audience whereby the earlier commits to tell the whole truth about an event and the latter, in return, commit to listen and attend to that truth. This testimonial contract is driven by an underlying ethical imperative whereby the poet is a “moral witness” in Avishai Margalit’s sense of the term, who, having experienced terror, addresses a moral community of readers on behalf of the community of victims, i.e., those who did not survive or choose to remain silent for another reason and hence cannot act as witnesses. Now, unlike in court cases, the poet does not depose under oath so the testimonial contract is bound to remain implicit and will only be ascertained by certain textual and paratextual indicators of veracity. The principal aim of my book is to establish what those indicators are and at which point they cease to be facultative and become mandatory, placing inexorable ethical and epistemological demands on our interpretative procedures.