DISINTEGRATION OF REALISM AND THE GENRE INTERMEDIATENESS IN VELJKO PETROVIĆ’S “BUNJA”
DISINTEGRATION OF REALISM AND THE GENRE INTERMEDIATENESS IN VELJKO PETROVIĆ’S “BUNJA”
Author(s): Mihajlo PantićContributor(s): Ljubica Jankov (Translator)
Subject(s): Cultural history, Political history, Social history, Serbian Literature, Pre-WW I & WW I (1900 -1919), Theory of Literature, Sociology of Literature
Published by: Матица српска
Keywords: Veljko Petrović; “Bunja”; 1909; Serbian prose; early 20th century; modernist literature; disintegration of realism; realistic poetics; turning inward;
Summary/Abstract: “Bunja” – that early, probably the most famous (though not the best) story by Veljko Petrović, first published in 1909 – is illustrative, maybe just because it is not an extreme example of certain more general, transformative processes observed in the early twentieth century Serbian prose.1 In “Bunja”, namely, apart from Petrović’s individual entirely creative characteristics, it is possible to notice two general features of prose of the age of modernist literature which will be explained in more detail in this text, with emphasis on the author’s specificities. It is about the announcement of the disintegration of realistic poetics (“turning inward” – as Leon Edel would put it) and a kind of genre intermediary – a textual and poetic fluctuation between novelistic and narrative conventions, which, once again, confirms the thesis that genre shifts always occur at the turn of the epoch, when worn or petrified poetics is replaced by poetics in progress, a poetics that itself oscillates between convention and innovation, between the negation of the old and the affirmation of new artistic construction.
Journal: Literary Links of Matica srpska
- Issue Year: 2020
- Issue No: 6-7
- Page Range: 94-100
- Page Count: 7
- Language: English
