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- Title
Die zerstreute Erbschaft.
- Authors
Biti, Vladimir
- Abstract
How can narrative come to terms with the past in a world hit by trauma was one of the questions most consistently investigated in the work of Walter Benjamin. Pursuing it in various past and present contexts, he gradually reassessed the marginalized literary tradition of narrative strolling along the scene of the crime, rummaging through and collecting of the putative indices. The chaotic execution site, calling its observers and investigators to responsibility toward its heap of ruins, resists sovereign narrative reconstruction of its emergence. The latter is therefore replaced by various conjectures, repeated preparations and hesitating roundabouts which ultimately turn the plot into a kind of a bewildering rebus, neither a story nor a picture. I read Dubravka Ugrešić's posttraumatic novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1997) within this tradition of narratives that strategically couple the incompatible registers of discursive and visual presentation, trivial and high literature, the beautiful and the sublime, materiality and immateriality with one another. Its discourse is haunted by a multitude of exiled or absolved voices and gazes who do not permit a homogeneous and transparent story. Ugrešić's narrator is, like Benjamin's flaneur, obsessed by their summoning resonance stored in the myriad of dissipated fragments of today's posttraumatic world.
- Subjects
MUSEUM of Unconditional Surrender, The (Book); UGRESIC, Dubravka, 1949-; BENJAMIN, Walter, 1892-1940; POST-traumatic stress disorder in literature; LITERATURE
- Publication
Arcadia -- International Journal for Literary Studies, 2013, Vol 47, Issue 2, p345
- ISSN
0003-7982
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/arcadia-2012-0021