BETWEEN FICTION AND TESTIMONY: KIŠ, ALBAHARI, DRNDIĆ

Text topic: Literature Post-Yugoslav Times: Destinies and Comments

Text author: Boris Postnikov

The article deals with literary treatment of historical documents on mass extermination of Jews in the Second World War. It focuses on texts by Danilo Kiš, David Albahari and Daša Drndić. The idea of ‘post-Yugoslav literary field’ provides the context for interpretation, and different narrative strategies of implementation of historical documents in the works of fiction are connected with the theoretical question of authorship, posed by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. The concept of the author as an instance that completes other peoples’ testimonies is transposed to the level of the literary character, in order to give an answer to the fundamental question of Giorgio Agamben: What does it mean to be the subject of desubjectivation, and how can a subject give an account on their own desintegration?