ŠTO JE BIO JUGOSLAVENSKI SOCIJALIZAM I ŠTO DOLAZI POSLIJE? DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ I DRUŠTVENO ZNANJE KNJIŽEVNOSTI
WHAT WAS YUGOSLAV SOCIALISM AND WHAT COMES AFTER? DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ AND THE SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE OF LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: After the breakup of Yugoslavia and the 1990s wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, mainstream political and media discourses in the former Yugoslavia largely shaped social knowledge about the recent past and contemporary times. These discourses spread mostly reductive narratives on the topics of Yugoslav socialism, the wars and transition, spreading capillary through education and other forms of institutional knowledge mediation. In a critical examination of such narratives, Dubravka Ugrešić’s work proves particularly instructive for gaining insight into what Yugoslav socialism was and what came after. It is precisely the reflection of social changes in the 1990s that emerge as a frequent theme in Dubravka Ugrešić’s post-1990 texts after 1990. Among these, the author’s texts and projects that intervene in pedagogical, administrative and scientific discourse in a specific way stand out. From the Lexicon of Yugoslav Mythology to the Red School, Ugrešić’s texts and projects offer a complex network of intellectually, aesthetically and emotionally engaged observations about the aforementioned social events and processes that can also be read as an indirect critique of institutional knowledge production. Drawing on recent theoretical research dealing with the relationship between literature and social knowledge (Felski 2016; Váňa 2020, 2021, 2022, etc.), the analysis of this aspect of the author’s oeuvre considers the specific work of the literary text in relation to surrounding discourses. Central analytical attention is given to the novel The Ministry of Pain (2004) to rethink the place of literature in the formation of social knowledge, through three characteristic patterns in the literary formation of knowledge about society: microstories, “imaginative theorizing”, and reference to one’s own fictional status.

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