Erotizam u američkoj i srpskoj međuratnoj prozi o Prvom svetskom ratu
Doktorand
Mišić, MarijanMentor
Popović Srdanović, DubravkaČlanovi komisije
Vukčević, RadojkaĐorđić, Stojan
Milić, Novica
Milutinović, Dejan
Metapodaci
Prikaz svih podataka o disertacijiSažetak
Doctoral dissertation EROTICISM IN INTER-WAR AMERICAN AND SERBIAN FICTION
ON WORLD WAR I aims to examine the problem of eroticism in the context of the modernist
and avant-garde war fiction in American and Serbian inter-war period. For this reason, a special
attention is focused on the French philosopher and theorist of eroticism Georges Bataille’s
typology which discerns three contingent types of eroticism: physical eroticism, emotional
eroticism and religious (sacred) eroticism. This typology is of fundamental importance because
Bataille insists on the unbreakable bond between eroticism and war. He argues that war, sacrifice
and orgy spring from the same origin connected to a specific dynamics of prohibitions opposing
the expressions of the existing human killing and sexual forces. Accordingly, war can be
considered a form of social institution inspired by humane dialectics of eroticism as a
contradictory experience of disturbing discontinuity and irrational desire of its overcoming ...in the
devastating continuity. Based upon these assumptions this study shows that, contrary to the
traditional form of imagining the war as a space of heroic utopia, in the works of postwar writers
of the youngest generation war was interpreted as a form of liminal order dominated by the
wanton and lewd, sensuous and egoistic, and significantly determined by the fantasy of living out
suppressed passions and desires trespassing all the boundaries of concern. By proving the
operability of Bataille’s fundamental thesis in the war imagination of the American and Serbian
interwar fiction, this study questions a widely accepted critical position that the authors (often
witnesses of the war devastations) describe the war from the perspective of total alienation, as
something hostile and absolutely foreign to human nature. The conclusions of this research are,
therefore, articulated in accordance with a new paradigm observed in the critical and theoretical
works on inter-war American and Serbian fiction on World War I, in the late 20th and early 21st
century. The new paradigm is unquestionably based on a visible effort to demystify the cultural
myth of “Lost Generation,” i.e. to make problematic reading the traditional critical position that
the most important literary works of the American and Serbian inter-war fiction on World War I
represent authentically anti-war texts, primarily inspired by horrors of war and pacifist
convictions of authors. Although “defeatism,” “disillusion,” and “defeat” as well as “anti-war,”
“anti-militarist,” and ”pacifist” function as widely recognized labels in the construction of the
“Lost generation” cultural myth and its “fiction of protest,” the majority of contemporary
researchers believe that this narrative discourse has never left the distinctive area of the so called
masculine writing. Despite of the extremely critical perspective on the war destruction,
absurdity, horrors of mass atrocities, and impersonal technological massacre as well as the defeat
of the traditional epic ideology and heroic myth of patriarchal culture, contemporary critics also
insist that these literary works uncompromisingly reinterpret traditional awareness of the war as
an exclusively male space, and “war” experience as typically male.
Any form of narrative transposition insisting upon authentic representation of complex war
experience, tending at the same time to repudiate different patterns of ideological molding and
propaganda, cannot fail observing war as a form of liminal order determined by a fantasy of
acting beyond all norms and prohibitions of everyday life in state of peace. That is why this
study insists that unmasking of the traditional canon forms that glorify war and heroic warrior
ethics does not imply distancing from phallic eroticism and hegemonic aspects of martial
masculinity. Although eroticism is used as a tool for unmasking traditional romantic and epic
forms of war imagination, it also shapes a new kind of hero, a warrior whose activities are
primarily inspired by ephemeral desires, fears, complexes and repressed fervors, and not by
defense of epic values and the common wealth of the community. Thus, by focusing on the body
and sexuality in the war experience narrative transposition, authors of the American and Serbian
inter-war fiction undoubtedly emphasize a distance from traditional patterns of literary war
transpositions and epic morality, but not from the phallic matrices of sexual behavior as
paradigmatic values of a patriarchal culture. Therefore, their protest should not be judged as a
radical rejection or denial, but rather as striving for aesthetic revaluation of the world as well as
traditional patterns that do not match the sensibility of a modern man.
Based on the observed dynamics of the reevaluation of the traditional patterns in the narrative
transposition of the immediate war experience, this study proposes that the narrative discourse of
the American “fiction of protest” and the Serbian modernist/avant-garde fiction on World War I
should be determined as “anti-utopian” rather than as “anti-war” or “pacifist”. This proposal is
founded in the fact that the primary intention of the American and Serbian writers was not a
promotion of an utopian idea of “the world without war,” but contrary to that, demythologization
and desacralization of the war as a space of epic utopia. Exposure of the universal unfoundedness
of dominant myths of national ideologies, as well as emphasis on a fatal dynamics of the human
being permanently torn between prohibitions and transgressions, which lie in the foundation of
eroticism as a specific phenomenon of rebellion, provocation and unmasking, condition these
authors inability to generate any utopian model. Their writings shape, on the other hand, a
distinctive avant-garde model of optimal projection fundamentally opposed to any idea of the
closed or ideally structured utopian space. Since it unambiguously defines a process of dynamic
events and structural changes, the given model undoubtedly opens up possibilities for different
problem-based approaches, as well as it offers an opportunity to articulate the conclusions in line
with the new paradigm of reading the most important works of inter-war American and Serbian
fiction on World War I.