(Dis)Regarding History: Slavenka Drakulić’s and Dubravka Ugrešić’s Female Voices from Croatia
(Dis)Regarding History: Slavenka Drakulić’s and Dubravka Ugrešić’s Female Voices from Croatia

Author(s): Vlatka Velčić
Subject(s): Gender Studies, Croatian Literature
Published by: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti
Keywords: rape; exile;
Summary/Abstract: My essay will explore two female writers from Croatia, Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić, in the light of the context outlined above. Both women represent rare female voices that were present in Croatian (and the former Yugoslavian) public life before the 1990s. They both continued to publish through the Civil Wars and their aftermath. My essay will specifically focus on the two most recent novels of these authors, Drakulić’s “S.: A Novel about the Balkans” and Ugrešić’s “The Museum o f Unconditional Surrender”, which reveal two different strategies in the fictionalization of female voices. Drakulić’s “S.”, about a Bosnian woman who gives birth as a result of rape, focuses on and attempts to recreate a ‘testimonio of a ‘real life’ victim. In her autobiographical, experimental novel, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Ugrešić manages not only to preserve the complexity of the women’s perspectives but also incorporates a meta-narrative of the postcolonial condition of exile.

• Details
• Contents