Tehnike i postupci modernističke naracije u romanu Mojkovačka bitka Ćamila Sijarića
Modernistic Narrative Techniques and Processes in Camil Sijaric’s Novel The Battle of Mojkovac

Summary/Abstract: Literary critics have interpreted The Battle of Mojkovac either as a traditional realist novel, a historical novel, or a chronicle. They were most likely led to this reading by the novel’s historical setting and its historic importance and tragedy. Ti’aditiona1 critique, however, has failed to notice certain literary techniques and methods of a decidedly modernistic bent which are entirely at odds with the very nature of a historical novel. The Battle of Mojkovac rests on a complex structure which possesses all the elements of modernistic literary expression. What is a first sight a realist war novel is interwoven and intersected by a love narrative which so perplexes the structure and flow of the novel that it renders it a fairly typical modernistic composition. The reevaluation of the novel’s poetics took place somewhere at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. „Ćamil Sijarić has habitually been described as a writer who dealt with local themes, a good writer whose place in contemporary literary history has been secured by high- quality works (...), but who ultimately came short of casting any light on the nature of man. A modern writer’s task is precisely to throw light on man in all his situations, most of all on his hidden depths which are dark, closed off, and contorted.” The same critic insists on the universality of Sijarić’s work: “When Ćamil Sijarić took off from his own homeland, when the homeland became merely an inspiration, a background from which to soar up and enter the company of Faulkner, that is when he came to his own.” Still more unequivocal in emphasising the modernistic traits of Sijarić’s narrative is E. Kazas, a distinguished connoisseur of his oeuvre: “Sijarić’s Battle of Mojkovac and his version of history are already in touch with the modernistic idea of individuality as well as with the blaze of existentialist philosophy in the South Slav culture.” This paper is the result of a study of narrative models in The Battle of Mojkovac based on the assumption that the novel is structured around modernistic poetic techniques and practices. The outcome of the study far exceeded the initial expectations.

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