Gastvortrag von Vladimir Arsenijevic

Am Donnerstag, 11.10.2012 hat Vladimir Arsenijevic, ein Schriftsteller aus Belgrad, zum Thema "War-Time Pop in Postwar Years" einen Vortrag gehalten.

Inhalt: In this lecture I intend to talk about a generation of writers, to which I myself also belong, which came into being in the mid-90's throughout former Yugoslavia, then in the state of acute and out and out war. It is a story about how (extreme) political and social circumstances helped to shape and influence one particular literary scene whose participants, due to circumstances, in many cases did not even know of each other’s existence, and were scattered throughout the crumbled, destroyed country, and still evolved in a similar way, bound together by their decision not to look away from sheer horrors of everyday reality by finding them aesthetically unpleasing and escaping into a cosy little world of intertextual postmodernist idea of literary heaven or alternatively trying to find justifications for violence and destruction through different forms of historicism, and thus changed the way literature was written in that period in the region of former Yugoslavia. I will follow with the postwar years (2000-2010) which, at least in theory, allowed these separate scenes, that were connected by a single, selfsame language, to exchange influences and partly merge. I will also look at how the Internet and all other modern media helped to shape the process as well. The last part will be about the modern era. I will discuss the global crisis that literature is facing nowadays and whether there is ahead of us a world without a literature as we know it. It will be a discussion about many different obstacles that literature is facing in the immediate reality and also about the dynamic and complex relationship it forms with this same immediate reality.