EXILE AS A TRAUMATIC PRETEXT OF A COUNTERNARRATIVE LITERATURE: THE MUSEUM OF UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER BY DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ
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Date
2025
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Plovdiv University Press
Abstract
The text undertakes another attempt to read Ugrešić’s great novel from the viewpoint of the recent phenomenon of an East European world literature. It is an attempt to demonstrate how features such as counter-narrativity, anti-fictionality, and non-linearity, summoning key novels by Tokarczuk, Cărtărescu, Krasznahorkai, and Gospodinov, find their paradigmatic model in the novel of this Croatian exile. Her prose invents and implements the paradoxical regime of an intellectual commentary distance, pursuing identification through pain. An amateurish authenticity, shining out from an imitation of exemplary art, is the artistic program that, openly formulated and fulfilled by Ugrešić, was indirectly inherited and developed by Tokarczuk and Gospodinov, bringing them world audiences and awards. At the end, the text reflects on why a program that proved so successful with Tokarczuk and Gospodinov did not make Ugrešić the literary star and cult writer she deserves to be.
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Keywords
narrative, trauma, exile, nomadic literature, East European literature, world literature