Dijana Simić - Narratives of Intimacy in Contemporary Bosnian-Herzegovinian Prose
South Slavic literary historians assume that after the highly politicized 1990s, a new literary trend in the post-Yugoslav literatures has been established. In their opinion, authors from the ex-Yugoslav region no longer devote themselves to – in the Lyotardian sense – grand narratives of war and (anti-)nationalism, but rather address the sphere of intimate, private life giving their literary works universalistic meaning independent of their creation contexts. However, many literary examples show – in the sense of the well-known feminist slogan – that the private is to be understood as political and therefore contextual. Since the 1990s, the feminist assumption that the dimension of the political is intertwined with that of the personal has been refined by anglophone Affect Studies. In my presentation, I will firstly discuss concept(s) of intimacy in the context of post-Yugoslav literatures with reference to approaches from South Slavic Literary Studies and anglophone Affect Studies. Subsequently, intimacy will serve as a prism for the analysis of selected examples of recent Bosnian-Herzegovinian prose.
Dijana Simić is a university assistant of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian (B/C/S) literary and cultural studies in the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Graz. Her teaching and research focus on Identity in Post-Yugoslav Literatures, as well as Gender, Migration and Memory Studies in the South Slavic context. After graduating in B/C/S-philology in 2013, she attended the interdisciplinary doctoral program "Southeastern Europe" at the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz and continued her education in the field of Slovenian Philology at the Universities of Graz and Ljubljana. Since 2014, she has been coordinating the international CEEPUS teaching project on “Current Research Trends in Slavic Studies” taking place at the Universities of Graz, Ljubljana, Novi Sad, Olomouc, Warsaw and Zadar. As a Marietta-Blau-fellow, she worked on her dissertation project on “Narratives of Intimacy in Contemporary Bosnian-Herzegovinian Prose” at the Central European University in Budapest and the University of Sarajevo in 2017.