POLITIKA ŽANRA – NA NJEZIN NAČIN
THE POLITICS OF GENRE – IN HER OWN WAY

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with the treatment of genre in Dubravka Ugrešić’s early short stories and novels as the starting point of her poetics and opens a discussion about the concept of literature and its politics, which is in the background of both the genre status of her early works and her oeuvre as a whole. Using the short story “Love Story” from the 1978 collection Poza za prozu (A Pose for Prose) and the 1988 novel Forsiranje romana reke (Fording the Stream of Consciousness), the analysis focuses on a specific connection between literature and politics that manifests itself in the author’s approach to the genre and continues to develop throughout her oeuvre, stubbornly resisting not only simplified interpretations of her work, but also broader ideas about the social functions of literature. In doing so, the paper also highlights possible theoretical perspectives through which to consider the critical potential of the author’s use of genre in her early works: the deconstructivist conception of the law of genre, the feminist critique of realist poetics, and the formalist concepts of evolution and parody.

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