Исидора Секулић: бој с контрастима
Isidora Sekulić: Battling Contrasts

Summary/Abstract: The paper explores and interprets the critical reception of Isidora Sekulić’s work and social involvement, and the impact that this reception had on Serbian and Yugoslav culture. This leads to the consideration of literary and non-literary facts that caused a simplified and stereotypical understanding and evaluation of Sekulić’s work, which, as it turns out is a common strategy when a woman writer is included in the literary and cultural canon. Our research points to the need for feminist intervention in the discursive field of literary scholarship (history/theory/criticism), to determine the literary reach and impact of Isidora Sekulić’s work on Serbian culture. The present study focuses on essays that deal with the struggle for processuality in thought and creativity, advocacy for the realization of the right to intellectual work and the objective evaluation of that work within an academic environment dominated by male authorities; in other words, the right to one’s intellectual and poetic subjectivity, which in a patriarchal society necessarily represents otherness. From the gender studies perspective, we analyse the causes and consequences of the poetic and ideological misunderstanding of the works of I. Sekulić (especially the short story collection Companions) on part of J. Skerlić. In our opinion, the causes of the “conflict” are based in Isidora’s ambivalent and ideologically non-monolithic attitude towards the phenomenon of patriotism as well as towards the committed, mobilising and utilitarian role of literature. The aforementioned efforts of Isidora Sekulić represent a rebellion against poetic determinism and were harbingers of a different (avant-garde) literary practice.

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