Archive for: Globalization and Literature

This paper discusses the issue of identity formation focusing on the transformative potential of hybridity, in two contemporary Serbian novels: Gordana Ćirjanić’s The Penultimate Journey (Pretposlednje putovanje, 2001) and Tamara Jecić’s Stinky Onion (Stinky Onion, 2009). The novels relate the stories of displacement of two Serbian migrants at the end of the 20th century. In their difficult endeavor to localize themselves in an increasingly globalized world, the protagonists negotiate their identities through computer-mediated communication and consumerist societies. Their identity formation is analyzed through a hybridity paradigm, which, as proposed by the postcolonial theoretician Homi Bhabha, has the potential to challenge the dominant mechanisms of the construction of meaning allowing for the emergence of new meanings and identities.

In Western literature University has long been imagined as a metaphorical “ivory tower“ whose inhabitants had very little to do with the “common man”. However, the insular character of the academe did all but inhibit the development of a very vivid imagery concerning scientists, university professors and students. The stereotypical portraits of scholars as buffoons or occult magicians formed in early narratives like Plato’s dialogues and medieval legends, have survived to this day in global popular culture. In the nineteenth century, the literatures of Norway, Great Britain and North America saw the birth of a new genre: the university novel which was primarily concerned with depicting certain segments of the academe. The new rather romanticized or optimistic representations which have emerged in these novels can be interpreted in relation to the gradual popularization of university education in the respective countries. In the Anglo-American context, a real breakthrough occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, with the publication of several classics of the genre. In Norway, the university novel did not expand until the 1990s, coinciding with a renewed interest in the genre in the English-speaking world. The world of academia evoked in these often satirical works is quite different from the world of the nineteenthcentury novels, as they explore ideological debates of the time, question the postulates of the academia, and for the first time present the university man as the “common man”. 

Starting from intertwining relations of the two media – photography and literature – this article is an attempt at describing how ubiquitous processes of media globalization actually reflect on some esthtetic facts. The thesis is supported by analysis of three narratives from recent Croatian literature: O biografiji (1987) by Irena Vrkljan, Krhotine (1991) by Željka Čorak and Muzej bezuvjetne predaje (1997) by Dubravka Ugrešić. 

Travelogues about the Far East are an important part in the work of the contemporary Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai (1954), despite the fact that they went relatively unnoticed compared to the wide international recognition of his earlier books, especially his first two novels, Satantango (1985) and The Melancholy of Resistance (1989). This article deals with some cultural aspects of Krasznahorkai’s non-fictitious travelogue Destruction and Sorrow Underneath the Sky (2004) in which the author/narrator gives an account on his third journey to China undertaken in May 2002. He goes there with the presumption that China is the only country in the world where a productive symbiosis of the ancient cultural and spiritual heritage on one hand and the (post)modern way of life on the other is still possible. However, as the journey progresses, his disappointment grows bigger and bigger. He realizes that in today’s market and business-oriented China all the important historical sights (even the seemingly most hidden, once inapproachable Buddhist monasteries) have been ruthlessly turned into vulgar tourist-attractions. The vast majority of the interviewed subjects (mostly directors of major national cultural institutions) give irritatingly shallow and dogmatic answers to almost all the questions posed by the narrator. The only genuine and honest answers about their reparable and tragic gap between the traditional values of the ancient Chinese civilization and the contemporary westernized lifestyle based on consumerism and comfort, come from marginalized individuals without any influence on the society or the decision-makers. Stressing the importance of these marginalized voices seems to remain one of the greatest values of Krasznahorkai’s writing, along with the trademark of his earlier books – the extremely long sentences – which give his works a unique and inimitable pulsating rhythm.