History and Remembrance in Three Post-Yugoslav Authors: Dubravka Ugrešić, Daša Drndić, and Aleksandar Zograf
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History and Remembrance in Three Post-Yugoslav Authors: Dubravka Ugrešić, Daša Drndić, and Aleksandar Zograf by Vladislav Beronja A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Slavic Languages and Literatures) in the University of Michigan 2014 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Tatjana Aleksić, Chair Associate Professor Kerstin Barndt Associate Professor Herbert J. Eagle Associate Professor Andrew H. Herscher Professor Tatjana Jukić, University of Zagreb ©Vladislav Beronja 2014 In the memory of my grandmother Desanka Beronja ii Acknowledgments This dissertation owes it completion to many mentors, colleagues, family members, and friends. First, I’d like to thank Herbert Eagle for seeing in me a potential scholar and encouraging me to apply to the graduate program six and a half years ago, when I was still a bookish undergraduate furiously finishing my thesis. The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, under Herb’s direction, has been a welcoming, warm and generous home, which I will be sad to leave. For all the encouragement, crisis management, and creative freedom I’d like to express my undying gratitude to Prof. Tatjana Aleksić, my main advisor. I am especially indebted to Prof. Kerstin Barndt from the neighboring German Department for simulating conversations, intellectual encouragement, and continued support in the context of the Avant- Garde Group and, in particular, the graduate seminar on museums and memory. In many ways, this seminar was the jumping board for this study. I would also like to thank Prof. Andrew Herscher for his willingness to be a part of this project. Needless to say, I take full responsibility for all the missed marks and gaping absences, while maintaining hope that I will have the chance to correct them in the near future. I owe no small debt to Jean McKee, especially in the last stretch, where every word of encouragement, e-mail, and phone call, meant the difference between finishing and not finishing. I am grateful to my colleagues in the field Stijn Vervaet, Renata Jambrešić-Kirin, and especially Prof. Tatjana Jukić for her willingness to be on the dissertation committee on such a short notice. I look forward to exchanging ideas and texts with them in the future. iii This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous support from the Rackham Graduate School, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and several other sources of funding, in particular, the ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in Eastern European Studies and the Mellon Summer Dissertation Writing Fellowship. I’m not sure about the return on investments with respect to literary scholarship, but I’m glad institutions such as those listed above still exist and continue to provide financial support for the advancement of critical thought. In the same vein, I’d like to thank Mrs. Mona Stolz for setting up a grant in the memory of her late husband Prof. Benjamin Stolz and for allowing young scholars working on the former Yugoslavia to advance their research. As a recipient of this grant for two consecutive summers, I hope that this dissertation will in some small way honor the memory of Prof. Stolz and his legacy. I ‘d like to thank my mom and dad for the freedom they’ve given me to explore the roads less traveled; for their courage to venture into the unknown, with all the risk, pain, and potential hope that such a leap ultimately entails. For all the late night conversations, I’d like to thank Aleksandar Bošković and my brother Boris, although I could not always keep up with all the dazzling arguments and references to Žižek and Deleuze. A special line has to be reserved for Justine Adema, who has broken up periods of despair with levity and peals of laughter, even if these too were often tinged with darkness. And finally, I want to thank Emil Erdec for those careless moments of togetherness, when the world seems unbearably light: “it’s wonderful /to get out of bed/ and drink too much coffee/ and smoke too many cigarettes/ and love you so much.” iv Table of Contents Dedication ............................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments .................................................................................................................................. iii List of Figures ........................................................................................................................................ vi List of Abbreviations ............................................................................................................................ vii Abstract................................................................................................................................................ viii Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1: ........................................................................................................................................ 30 Souvenirs of Communism: Allegory and Mourning in Dubravka Ugrešić's The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1997) CHAPTER 2: ........................................................................................................................................ 70 Transnational Spaces, Diasporic Times: Memory and Affect in Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Ministry of Pain (2005) CHAPTER 3: ...................................................................................................................................... 111 The Holocaust Archive and Democratic Pedagogy: Daša Drndić's Sonnenschein (2007) and April in Berlin (2009) CHAPTER 4: ...................................................................................................................................... 169 Chronicles of the Dream Nation: Aleksandar Zograf’s Regards from Serbia (2007) Conclusion........................................................................................................................................... 210 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... 215 v List of Figures Figure 1.1: Roland the Walrus ............................................................................................................. 47 Figure 1.2: Title page, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1997) ............................................ 50 Figure 1.3: Thomas Hoepker, EAST GERMANY. Berlin, 1990. ......................................................... 66 Figure 3.1: Sonnenschein, page 186 .................................................................................................... 137 Figure 3.2: Sonnenschein, page 136 .................................................................................................... 140 Figure 3.3: Sonnenschein, page 433 .................................................................................................... 141 Figure 3.4: April u Berlinu, page 237 .................................................................................................. 155 Figure 3.5: April u Berlinu, page 264 .................................................................................................. 166 Figure 4.1: Regards from Serbia, page 90 (unnumbered) ................................................................... 176 Figure 4.2: Regards from Serbia, page 13 (detail) ............................................................................... 178 Figure 4.3: Regards from Serbia, page 39 ........................................................................................... 192 Figure 4.4: Regards from Serbia, page 41 ........................................................................................... 193 Figure 4.5: Germany, 1923. ................................................................................................................ 194 Figure 4.6: Regards from Serbia, page 47 ........................................................................................... 197 Figure 4.7: Regards from Serbia, page 270 (detail) ............................................................................. 202 Figure 4.8: Regards from Serbia, page 208 (detail) ............................................................................. 204 vi List of Abbreviations SW = Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. 4. Vols. Cambridge, Mass. And London: Harvard University Press, 1996-2003. MS = Ugrešić, Dubravka. The Ministry of Pain. (trans.) Michael Henry Heim. New York: Ecco, 2006. SON = Drndić, Daša. Sonnenschein. Zaprešić Fraktura, 2007. AB = Drndić, Daša. April u Berlinu. Zaprešić Fraktura, 2009. RS = Zograf, Aleksandar. Regards from Serbia. Atlanta: Top Shelf Productions, 2007. vii Abstract This dissertation analyzes the multimedia works of three post-Yugoslav authors— Dubravka Ugrešić, Daša Drndić, and Aleksandar Zograf—against the historical background of Yugoslavia’s violent dissolution and the emergence of hegemonic nationalist narratives in Serbia and Croatia based, in large part, on the practice of historical revisionism, selective remembering of the past, and politically motivated myth-making. It argues that these works disrupt the dominant grammars of national memory by foregrounding rupture, fragment, and discontinuity, thereby refusing to structure the nation as a