Misunderstanding is a rule, understanding is a miracle: Ivo Andric's 'Bosnian Chronicle'

The article links the fictional world of Ivo Andric's novel Bosnian Chronicle to problems in literary hermeneutics as they concerti issues of dialogue and Cultural translation. The author claims that the opposition between East and West, repeatedly recalled in the characters' speech and traditionally taken to be the main theme of the novel, is actually dissolved and discarded by the novel itself. Instead, its true theme is the dynamics of human communication exemplified by the characters' attempts to understand one another and in their failure to do so, which makes Bosnian Chronicle a novel about misunderstanding

'Oh, to Be a European! What Rastko Petrovic Learnt in Africa'

Book description: Twelve studies explicitly developed to elaborate on travel writing published in book form by east Europeans travelling in Europe from ca. 1550 to 2000. How did east Europeans have positioned themselves with relation to the notion of Europe, and how has the genre of travel writing served as a means of exploring and disseminating these ideas? A truly comparative and collective work with a substantial introductory study, the book has taken full advantage of the interdisciplinary and comparative potential of the team of project scholars working in the different national literatures, from different disciplinary perspectives. This is the second volume of a three-part set of East Looks West. Vol. 1. Orientations: An Anthology of East European Travel Writing on Europe (forthcoming); Vol. 3. A Bibliography of East European Travel Writing on Europ

Territorial Trap: Danilo Kis, Cultural Geography, and Geopolitical Imagination

Most attempts to integrate “small,” or “minor,” or “third-world” literatures into a larger whole tend to be inadequate, deductive, and reductionist. Small literatures and their writers may crave recognition and attention, but they are not exactly helped if approached with a set of newly created stereotypes and dubious generalizations, which equate them with the geopolitical situation of their respective nations. This article focuses on Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters as an instance of this attitude towards small literatures. The article uses the example of Danilo Kiš, who figures prominently in Casanova’s book, and argues that his position within his native literary space and the place occupied by this space within world literature are misrepresented in The World Republic of Letters. This misrepresentation is not accidental: It necessarily follows from Casanova’s double mapping of this space, which is strongly influenced by geopolitical imagination and popular cultural geography. As long as the international literary space is imagined as overlapping with the space of great consecrating nations, comprising both their national as well as international writers, with the addition of international writers from the periphery “annexed” to them, the world literary map will only reproduce the (geo)political map of the world. The task of constructing a conceptual framework that will do justice to small or third-world literatures and their writers cannot be achieved so long as it is influenced by geopolitical imagination and popular cultural geography, and divides the world literature into the “first-world” and the rest

Retour d’exil. Découverte de l’autre en soi et de soi dans l’autre : L’Amour en Toscane de Miloš Crnjanski

The article interprets Miloš Crnjanski’s (1893-1977) travelogue Love in Tuscany (1930) in the discursive context of the debate on the cultural position of Slavs in Europe which took place in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes during the 1920s. The Expressionist writers constructed Slavdom as a cultural programme, the scientists Jovan Cvijić and Vladimir Dvorniković viewed it as a counter-balance to ‘Romano-Germanic’ Europe, and Ljubomir Micić, following the re-semantization of ‘barbarians’ in the European avant-garde movements, looked upon it as a harbinger of strength and vitality which would offer a new lease on life to an exhausted continent. Combining elements from all three positions, Crnjanski stylized Slavs as ‘barbarians’ who were bringing a new life, but also as those who had always taken part in the culturally unified continent: they had always been a part of wider European cultural processes, and after the First World War, they stepped forward as bearers of a newly-found cultural energy. In this respect, Crnjanski rejects the traditional feeling of inferiority which burdened many Balkan intellectuals of his generation, and represented his ‘home’ as a place which had to be valued. The article, however, also relativizes this interpretation by pointing to the transformation of the idea of ‘home’ in Crnjanski’s oeuvre and biography