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The paper is a survey of the stages of Bosniak literary development, along with the relationship between the most significant poetic phenomena of the given time periods and the question of Bosniak identity. As it will be seen, a certain identity image is mirrored in a literary work while, at the same time, the literary work itself tries to develop new identities in its recipients. Furthermore, close attention is directed towards intertextual relations between newer literature and tradition, which is one of the models of cultural memory that helps building literary identity. Through the very same vision of identity, Bosniak literature bears witness to the fact that the history of a national literature can also function as a history of literary taste or a history of searching to understand trauma. Every literary historian makes a choice whether to record a history of change in understanding and experiencing literary aesthetics or to record a history of pain, fear and trauma, as literature offers both.
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Narratives of Bosniak female authors from the early twentieth century evidently contain a prominent theme of the construction of modern identity, which is in line with changes encouraged by the Europeanization of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Extratextual circumstances influenced significantly the formation of the world of fiction, which is again created with the intention of transforming readers’ world view. In this context, the narratives of Bosniak female authors – primarily of Nafija Sarajlić, the first female prose writer, and Bisera Alikadić, the first female novelist in Bosniak literary practice – are particularly interesting. The paper analyzes the strategies of confirming one’s own identity that are taken by the protagonists in the world of fiction, as well as the authors’ strategies in their positioning in the earlier patriarchal, man-centered system.
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Analytical and interpretive objective of analysis of the autobiographical discourse of Meša Selimovic Memories (1976) is to examine the way the work represents the subjective and collective experience of liminal or hybrid identity and culture of Bosniaks. Theoretical and critical starting point for the work are the views and terms which are developed by the postcolonial critics Edward W. Said, Homi Bhabha and Jan Assmann, German scientist who has studied the cultural memory. These theorists with their theoretical models have focused on sub-cultures and parts of the world, interpreting the discursive construction of the colonial countries of the Orient and the Third World. The work aims to offer a reading of Selimovic’s autobiographical discourse through the prism of concepts of postcolonial criticism and cultural studies as a narrative that in the construction of identity of Bosniaks first adopts colonial stereotypes, participating in the creation and adoption of orientalist images and stereotypes about the Bosniaks, then affirms the diversity and variety of Bosniaks culture, moving the former margins to the position of equal center whose voice becomes one of many that we hear in literature and culture.
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The aim of this paper is to deconstruct, from feminist viewpoint, masculine centrality and to enlighten the position of a woman in Mak Dizdar’s collection of poems, Stone Sleeper. The awaken voices of Bosnian sleepers are male. The collection comprises poems that in different ways relate to reality, dreams and death of husbands, fathers and sons, who are associated with the stećak stones, and therefore are enliven as the voices of carvers, deacons, and the “owners” of stećak stones”, while a woman is the invisible historical subject. Neither traditional, essentialisticly postulated criticism nor recent poststructuralist and deconstructive oriented readings have paid attention to this aspect of Dizdar’s poetry.
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This paper will research into the questions of identity and the ways in which Zlatko Topčić answers to them in his novels. The paper focuses on the novels Kulin, Nightmare (Košmar) and Naked Skin (Gola koža) that were written and published in Sarajevo, during the agression on Bosnia and Herzegovina or right after that. First thing to notice is a biographical author who in his autopoeticism choses the identity of a historical and moral witness, and the next one is the series of identity questions posed by the texts of the novels. Starting from the individual trauma, through memory and testimony, Topčić’s novels question the identity of the marginalized victims and theirtestimonies through letters and writings, as well as the identity of the differently different others within the usual order of identity. These are novels in which the “I – witness“ through the artistic creation of traumatic memories becomes one of the creators of the collective memory.
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Recognizable in the literary world as an exceptionally lyric author, Hadžem Hajdarević has published two prose works by 2016 – a collection of short stories Plastic Surgery Clinic and a novel Where have you been these years. Hajdarević’s stories represent an attempt at eclectic unification of the modernist tradition and the post-modern narrative procedures. The typical theme of modern poetry – the intellectual and his internal world – is treated through self-referential inversion thanks to which the text takes over the role of “the protagonist“, while taking pleasure in the theoretically-inspired questioning of its own performances in a way that could be approximately defined by using the term concetto (a baroque figure that attempts to impress the reader by using the inventiveness of pictures, images and connections between objects and occurrences). Nevertheless, the author succeeds, by using double text coding, to establish communication with different profiles of readers. The consciousness of limitations of reception of this poetics has encouraged Hajdarević, whose public engagement has, in the meantime, intensified in the media and, indirectly, in politics, to focus more decisively on realistic prose and neo-realistic, mimetic writing in his debut novel. The novel is characterized by the imbalance of diegetic and lyricdiscursive layers of the novel, a result of powerful inertia of the lyrical approach in processing realistic content, relying on metaphoric-mimetic and symbolic transposition of the significant particularities, while the mimetic prose model, the author was forced to accept by the choice of the topic, requires, at least equal focus on traditional motivational (psycho-social) mechanisms of supportive elements of the narrative structure.
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Essay presents combination of impressionistic and analytic reflections about Spahić’s identity readings of Bosniak and Bosnia-Herzegovinian literature, which abet to new considerations of Bosnian history and literature, to new meetings with her friends and enemies, to new reviews of own being and all designations which were so close to us before those readings that we perhaps haven’t even noticed them, and then they were marked and shown to us by the author and we became aware of them as a trace of Self and Other in us.
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This work interpretate the poems by Ervin Jahić in the book Nemjesto (No-place). There are numerous poetical models in his poems. On the other side this is culturally constructed book in which the readers can question the identity in the 21st century. It is often a deconstruction of the humanistic values of the West, and also the deconstruction of the individual identity position in a everyday life. Jahić is questioning the positions of our identity and the construction of it.
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The epic character Alija Đerzelez has transcended onto other forms of oral literature, the most recent instance of which comes from fieldwork conducted in Srebrenica by the ethnologists of the National Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina at the beginning of 2009. Here Alija Đerzelez comes in the form of a 42-line long ballad, composed in the iambic pentameter. After an analysis of the existing variants, it has been confirmed that the poem was probably written in Herzegovina, and that the date of origin refers to a rather recent past (with the exception of Kurt’s variant published in his collection in 1902). The particularity of the last poem recorded lies in the fact that the massive and seemingly immortal myth about the invincible Đerzelez has come to an endpoint in this poem. The death of the hero of mythic proportions has been announced even in the only place where the belief in his immortality was alive – in a poem.
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This paper discusses the role of oral epic singing, recitation, own memories and collective remembrance in the Bosniaks/ Bosnian and Herzegovinian oral literature on the example of the recorded text, Testimony of the epic singer Halil Bajgoric. The figures and places of memories are shown, and the ways of their re/production in the epic tradition. Analysis was made on processes and circumstances under which, from overall historical events on the Bosnia and Herzegovina territory, singers/ narrators recycled and processed the appropriate fragments and made them as the base for the construction of their own or group identity, while at the same time some other historical episodes became places of suppresion and oblivion. The paper engaged the relationship between memory and history, and certain attitudes about the past which are reviewed within the selected fragments of written Bajgoric’s texts/ interviews. It is tried to answer the questions about the border identity of the Bosniaks and Bosnian literature. It was shown how selected fragments of oral singing/ testimony (narration) are suitable material for critical analysis of gender positions in a specific social context, and that epic oral literature represents a nonle area for articulation aspects of personal/ collective identity: authenticity, multiplication, identity crisis, devial recognition, problems of the state borders, nation, power, questions about the body, sexuality, family.
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The introduction of the article outlines the issue of black romanticism and gives reason why the concepts of vampire and doppelgänger have been combined with this aspect. The consecutive paragraphs present the definitions of vampirism and doppelgängerism based on „The Dictionary of the 19th-century literature” and works by various researchers (Maria Janion, Barbara Zwolińska, Dorota Samborska-Kukuć among others). There have been also provided the definition of unearthliness proposed by Maciej Szargot, one of the main researchers of the works by Józef Bogdan Dziekoński. This was the basis for building the essential part of the article, that is the interpretation of the story entitled „Willpower” by Józef Bogdan Dziekoński. The aim of the article is to provide justification for making this work the subject of not only the discourse regarding the doppelgänger, but also the vampire, while both of the interpretations may be treated equally, because not only are they not mutually exclusive, but also they are complementary. What is an important element is also the remark that the works by this writer may be considered in terms that refer to black romanticism, because both elements of vampirism as well as doppelgangerism are comprised in this issue.
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This article presents the interpretations of „Black Eyes” by Ludwik Sztyrmer with the use the tools offered by Jungian depth psychology. What is an interesting motif in the context of the research is madness. Therefore, the author is looking for archetypes that affect the implementation of this motif. Hence, the aim of the article is to examine the dark-romantic text with the method that has not been used so far.
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The article is a comparative analysis of „The Tomb of the Reichstal” family by Zygmunt Krasiński and the novel „The night of living Jews” by the present-day author, Igor Ostachowicz. What is the basis for the comparison is the theme of an underground cemetery, which in the case of the Gothic novel is the family mausoleum founded by the lord of the house, whereas in the modern novel it is Warsaw cellars that are in fact the graves of thousands of those who were killed during the war of Jews and Poles. The buried in the vaults have a decisive influence on the fate of the living protagonists of both of the texts. The article proves that those living characters have been also affected by death. From the analysis of the category of non-fatal death, through the explication of the motives of posthumous revenge, what follows is the description of the consequences of building a house on the cemetery, which boil down to the domination of the world of the dead over the world of the living. Both novels have become exemplifications of early Romantic anthropology of death and its aporia overpowered by the thought of the Romanticism of the forties. The last part of the article has been devoted to late thoughts of Zygmunt Krasiński, who understood death as the proper beginning of human existence. In this context, the writing by Ostachowicz turns out a grotesque, radical development of the vision of the world of early Romanticism — as if no reevaluations of the Romanticism of the forties had taken place.
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“The dark abysses of the Young Poland mind, or Dark Romantic inspirations of Stanisława Przybyszewski illustrated with the example of Nad morzem (At the Seaside)” is an attempt to interpret the poem by Stanisław Przybyszewski with reference to Dark Romanticism. The first part of the article presents an artistic profile of the Young Poland artist, including his interests and social contacts. After that, the circumstances surrounding the creation of the poem „Nad morzem” have been sketched out. The structure of the writing has been presented basing on the classification according to Gabriela Matuszek. In the next part of the article, the question of Przybyszewski’s inspiration with the writings by Romantic authors has been developed in order to introduce the reader to the issues of Dark Romantic themes. The writer’s fascination with the works by Novalis has been also briefly outlined. In the next part, the author of the article has focused on displaying elements typical of Dark Romanticism that appear in „Nad morzem”, and discussed the manner of their implementation. What was the main reference point is a specific creation of nature. Basing on the biography of Przybyszewski, the author has also introduced other Dark Romantic motifs that appear in the poem. The purpose of the article is to recollect the poet’s literary output, which is too often marginalized, and present him as a continuator of Dark Romanticism.
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The article entitled „It seemed to be a day seen through a burial shroud. The stories by Bruno Schulz and the themes characteristic of Dark Romanticism” discusses a few characteristics typical of the trend called Dark Romanticism in the context of the stories by one of the most outstanding Polish writers — Bruno Schulz. The associations between the prose by this author from Drohobycz and selected Romantic attitudes have been considered, however, what is the core of the essay is the interpretation of Dark Romantic themes, such as a characteristic of labyrinth, wanderer, doppelgänger, and the motif of madness and broadly understood darkness, on the background of selected stories from the volumes of „Sklepy cynamonowe” („The Cinnamon Shops”) and „Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą” („Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass”). The aim of the article is to present Bruno Schulz not as a twentieth-century continuator of Dark Romantic writing, but as an author who drew inspiration from the works of the leading representatives of the trend called Dark Romanticism (Edgar Allan Poe, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman), thus creating his own vision of literature with the use of the well-known nineteenth-century motives.
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In the text „On the Verge of Sleep, Reality and Death. Inspirations coming from Edgar Allan Poe in the Works by Bolesław Leśmian”, I have been making an attempt to analyze the threads that seem likely to have been derived by Bolesław Leśmian from one of the most famous Dark Romantic writers — Edgar Allan Poe. In the course of a detailed analysis, numerous motifs characteristic of the works by Poe have been referred to, and subsequently selected texts by Bolesław Leśmian, wherein one can find similar elements have been discussed. The aforementioned topics include, among others, the motif of a suffering woman, crime, the aesthetization of death or the oniric presentation of the moment of the end of life. Besides, the text does not just focus on providing examples of similarities between the two authors. It is also an attempt to illustrate the very individual approach of Leśmian to the borrowed motives and creative utilizing them.
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The article concerns the implementation of Dark Romantic motifs in short-story writings by Stefan Grabiński, and above all, the motive of madness. In my opinion, Grabiński, as a pioneer of Polish horror who took inspiration from one of the key creators of Dark Romanticism, Edgar Allan Poe, is one of those authors who should be seen, in the first place, as continuators of the tradition of Dark Romanticism. His works comprise motifs so much characteristic of this tradition, such as the motif of doppelgänger („Problemat Czelawy”, „Na tropie” — „On the Trail”), madness („Pożarowisko” — „Fire”, „Spojrzenie” — „Glance”) or demonism (frequently manifesting in the femme fatale characters in stories, such as „W domu Sary” („In the House of Sarah”) or „Kochanka Szamoty” („The Lover of Szamota”). What is relevant in the context of Dark Romanticism is also the recognition of the poetics of the works by Grabiński and placing it in the historical-literary context, while taking into consideration the fact that the prose by Grabiński has a modernist character, despite the fact that the author wrote during the interwar period.
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