Knjiženstvo, journal for studies in literature, gender and culture
Knjiženstvo, Journal for Studies in Literature, Gender and Culture is a free-access double-blind peer-reviewed electronic journal whose aim is to affirm interdisciplinary studies of women’s presence and work in literature, art and culture, as well as the field of digital humanities. The journal encourages cooperation in the study of gender in all languages, across various cultures and time periods. The editorial staff of the journal is particularly interested in innovative contributions of potential authors and is committed to the advancing of academic standards and the fight against every form of discrimination. Knjiženstvo is a scientific journal (category M52) included in the databases Scopus, EBSCO, ERIH PLUS and CEEOL. http://www.knjizenstvo.rs/en#gsc.tab=0 http://doi.fil.bg.ac.rs/unit. php?l=en&pt=journals&title= knjiz
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philology
Interdisciplinary International Summer School Sexual Desire Unbound: Literature, Landscapes, аnd Digital Dialogues
Lectures by Guest Professor Dr. Alenka Jensterle Doležal
Letters from Niš about Harems in the Albanian Language
The Memoirs of Jelica Belović-Bernadzikowska (Ljuba T. Daničić) are Published
Traces of Matriarchy in Serbian Literary Heritage
Deconstructing the Myths of Women’s Mental Health
An Insight From Within: Savka Subotić’s Correspondence
The Scopes of Charity: On the Work of the Maternal’s Association (1904–1941)
Bibliography of the Journal Women’s World: The Journal of Serbian Women’s Charity Associations: Part VI (1908–1911)
The bibliography represents the sixth part of the bibliography of the journal Women’s World: The Journal of Serbian Women’s Charity Associations. It encompasses four years of the journal’s publication, from 1908 to 1911, and contains 789 bibliographic items, described in the de visu language and script of the publication. The bibliography is structured chronologically, divided into four sections according to the year of publication, with the bibliographic units numbered consecutively. Within each year, the units are alphabetically organized by the author’s last name, or by the title of the article in cases where the texts are unsigned or signed with initials. A separate section, the Subject Index, stands out as a useful tool for quicker searching and researching the content. The index groups terms and topics covered in the journal, facilitating access to relevant information and making it easier to find specific topics within the publication.
Ljiljana Đurđić is considered an important Serbian women writer. Her oeuvre is not large, although significant, and even besides that, it is symptomatic that in the scientific community this significance is not recognized. Ljiljana Đurđić was a poetess, then a prosaist and a columnist. From the perspective of feminist, contextual and poetic analysis of prose, I am showing how this female author in her writings, in her editorial policy in the journal ProFemina, but foremost in her prose advocated for the modernist paradigm. This is interesting in the context of Serbian literary culture of the 20th century which was constituted through the struggle of modernist and antimodernist poetics. The literary work of this author I place in Belgrade’s socialist modernist culture which molded her and which she had never abandoned. Many of her beliefs about the dynamics of global (worldly) and local Serbian literary culture she expressed in the introduction to the Anthology Women’s Continent: Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Women’s Story, which she edited. Even though she wrote about female prose writers that are included in it, that text functions as her program text. In the analysis of several stories, I pointed out how the modernist literary paradigm is embodied in the narrative. I singled out the following aspects: self-referentiality and cosmopolitanism. In the text, I present the thesis that feminist theories, which from the nineties of the 20th century became an important constitutive force in the political, cultural and economic transformations of Serbian society in the conditions of war’s transition, substantially influenced Ljiljana Đurđić’s actions in the public sphere, and above all, in literature. At the bases of her actions are contradictory beliefs, that are typical for a culture in which she was forming and working. I singled out two constitutive contradictions, the attitude towards theory and towards feminism. She had a negative attitude towards theory, but at the same time, she read it and occasionally called upon it: theory functioned as a literary work to the extent that is indispensable today. The attitude towards feminism was changing. During socialism in the literary culture of the dominant stream, to which Ljiljana Đurić belonged, the influence of feminism was not that important. Socialist literature of the dominant steam constituted in opposition to feminism. When feminism from the beginning of the nineties started to globalize and became significant, Ljiljana Đurđić entered into feminist theories and used them to articulate her own actions. After 2000, feminism lost its significance, and Ljiljana Đurđić expressed a typical post-feminist belief that feminism had been overcome and was no longer needed. Nevertheless, her entire work as well as her prose can best be understood from the perspective of feminist beliefs and ideologies.
Intersections of Female And Regional Identity in a Selection of Contemporary Women’s Novels From Post-Yugoslav Space
This paper focuses on the intersections between the constructed female sexual and gender identity and the spatial identity, specifically the regional Balkan identity of the female protagonists of the selected novels by the intersectional feminist approach. These are novels by contemporary women writers from the post-Yugoslav space, published in the period from 2008 to 2011, are: Korov je samo biljka na krivom mjestu (Weed is only a plant in the wrong place) by Stela Jelinčić (2008), Paprat (Fern) by Dunja Radosavljević (2009) and Mogla je biti prosta priča (It could have been a simple story) by Ajla Terzić (2011). The selected novels, which focus on issues of female subjectivity and narrate the experiences of women in the post-Yugoslav transition context from a female perspective, are analysed from a gender-oriented and regionally specific perspective. Of particular importance for the analysis are the premises of intersectional feminism and contemporary feminist theories, especially the “locational feminist criticism” and feminist discourses within the “new geography of identity” by Susan Stanford Friedman, which are combined with the critique of Balkanist discourse by Maria Todorova and applied to the analysis of the novels. In this context, the key is the imagology of the Balkans as an imagined and constructed space in contrast to the so-called Western imagination of space. Likewise, an attempt is made to map and examine the aspects that offer the possibility of questioning sexual, gender and spatial identities as social constructs as well as the discourses that determine the socially-constructed notions of femininity and the ways in which this problem is manifested in the literary production of contemporary female authors from the postYugoslav space at the beginning of the 21st century. Furthermore, the paper takes into consideration the issues and constructions of female protagonists as migrant and displaced female subjects, who either find themselves in an ambivalent position between, between spaces and cultures, or are opting for multiple affiliations.
Poetics and paradigm of post/Yugoslavian antiwar feminist and/or women’s novel: Interpretation of the phenomenon of alcoholism in Rio bar by Ivana Sajko
This paper is founded on the challenge of opening a new field of research for genre variations of novels with the topic of Yugoslav wars in which numerous regional women writers tried their hand. To analytically cover the heterogeneous and usually hardly accessible field it was required to create an innovative and functional theoretical-critical framework of the research in the first place. In the theoretical construction of the paper, there were identified and generated two coordinates or transnational post/Yugoslav approach and transnational feminism. The context of the primary dimension includes destabilizing and overcoming national and canonical limiting values, while on the other hand disturbing the traditional position of women writers. The post/Yugoslavian phenomenon means the re/creation of the cultural with the goal of researching different perspectives on descriptive motives of the wars, the articulation of the female subject in the text and against flexibility of the novel form. That way the traditional positions of the women writers get destroyed, that is, examine the processes of stereotyping of women writers and their work, criticizing double standards of evaluation presenting in a world of literature and, in the end, affirming the undeniable and crucial female role in the rise of the novel as a genre. Based on engaging feminist-ethical philosophical approach and interdisciplinary strategies of interpreting literary texts and literary phenomenons, the focus is on the active women writing or the articulation of an autonomous female subject in resistance or beyond the nation, as well as the neglected female experience of wars depicted in novels of contemporary women writers. The primary task of this paper is reflected in theorizing the subgenre of the novel from the examined aspect of poetic characteristics of the post/Yugoslavian antiwar novel. The difference the subject subgenre counts on is related to a female vision of repressive wars which figures with a foundation on the ethical critique of patriarchal and military structures. The umbrella term of post/Yugoslav as a transnational approach circles those discarded and unknown pieces of work by women writers within the framework of national literatures to introduce them into wider areas of the analysis and include them into the mosaic of the alternative antiwar stories of wars’ disintegration of Yugoslavia. Post/Yugoslav feminist and/or women’s novels represent literary reflections on the connecting feminine experience of living in traditional systems and culture with the main historical event of war’s disintegration of Yugoslavia. The types in which this subgenre occurs are feminist and/or women’s novels. Both types of novels affect the transformation from national to transnational literature in a way that disturbs the dominant representations of women and enters the framework of antiwar’s humanistic cognition of knowledge. The next step in the scientific description of this field represents variant of systematization of unexplored material, apropos creating a paradigmatic review of the genre or literary constellation that consists of eight thematic circles which are argued with a handful of examples. Although it is now spoken of eight different, but complementary thematic fields of the feminist and/or woman’s novel subgenre, the main emphasis is on the inclusiveness and communicativeness of the sketch in the direction of replenishment. The formed concentric circles for which the examples are given and which are scientifically described cover the big subgenre topics of the novel: a) wartime’s disintegration of the family, b) educational or novel of a girl growing up under the conditions of war, c) development of a female subject throughout the text, d) imprinting of war on the map of the female body e) disintegration of a female identity f) wartime forced exile g) the subject in the war space and h) destruction of the war’s and postwar’s or transitional’s community. Aiming to test uncovered scientific assumptions related to the post/Yugoslavian anti-war feminist and/or women’s novel, a hypothesis is put forward that follows the specific phenomenon of the representation of the conditioning of alcoholism in women and the experience of wars and transition, using the example of the novel Rio Bar (2006) by Ivana Sajko. The driving motive of Rio Bar is coded by the phenomenon of alcoholism, which has not been considered in existing research. Therefore, in this paper and when checking the scientific position of the field, the focus is on the literary shaping of the reworking of war and transitive trauma correlated with space, and the question of the articulation of the female subject from the position of revolt and not belonging to the order.
post/Yugoslavian antiwar feminist and/or woman’s novel
From Bohemian Lifestyle to Feminist Consciousness: Sunčana Škrinjarić and Yugoslav Women’s Writing
This article interprets Sunčana Škrinjarić’s prose and radio plays in the context of Yugoslav cultural history as well as socialist and contemporary reflections on female authorship (its social significance as well as thematic and stylistic particularities). I reflect on Škrinjarić’s trilogy, the novels Ulica predaka [The Street of Ancestors], Ispit zrelosti [The Matriculation Exam], and Bijele strijele [The White Arrows]. In the trilogy, written between 1980 and 2004, Škrinjarić uses autobiographical material to tell the story of Tajana’s fraught coming of age and thwarted artistic ambitions. The trilogy sardonically reflects on the male-centered official and counter-cultural canon. While the trilogy is the most comprehensive example of Škrinjarić’s recurring preoccupations and character types (ambitious mediocre man, sullen young woman, struggling poet, crazed communist) and also the work in which she first introduced her polyphonic, lyrical style, I argue that she has been exploring the theme of marginality since the 1960s. In the stories “Jedno ljeto” [One Summer] and “Trovanje biljkom” [Poisoned by a Plant], the non-normative bodies were finally given a distinctly feminist slant. As her short story “Mesareva ljubav” [The Butcher’s Love] shows, even in the conservative 1990s Škrinjarić was not deterred from criticizing violence against women and the judicial system that facilitated it. The article also reflects on Škrinjarić’s lesser-known novel Kazališna kavana [The Theatre Café], a depiction of bohemia in 1950s Zagreb – the liberalism of men was pardoned, while that of women could have led to a horrific and illegal abortion. Finally, Škrinjarić’s radio play “Tamna soba” [The Dark Room], an intersectional representation of various socialist femininities, reflects pessimistically on the erasure of women’s oeuvres. These works are placed in a dialogue with scholarship on Yugoslav women writing (Lukić, Zlatar, Lóránd) as well feminist theory (Halberstam) and narratology (Cohn, Rimmon-Kenan).
Between Serbia, America and Britain: a Sociolinguistic View of the Writings of Mabel St. Clair Stobart and Jelena Lozanić
This paper deals with the construction of a complex sociolinguistic narrative network of meaning that includes intricate interaction of societies and individuals, local and global, based on narratives written by two female authors about personal experiences from the First World War: Mission for Serbia: Letters from America and Canada 1915-1920 (1970) by Jelena Lozanić Frothingham and The Flaming Sword in Serbia and Elsewhere (1916) by Mabel St. Clair Stobart. The authors presented their own experience of the war and the complexity of a woman’s identity, while they were relocated to a different environment – Jelena Lozanić from Serbia to the United States of America and Canada, and Mabel Stobart from England to Serbia. Through the sociolinguistic narrative network of these works, we discover new positions of power that women won by actively participating in the First World War, regardless of geographical distance, the diversity of their positions, roles, and environments. The messages of humanism and pacifism are addressed to the readers of both works, while concrete examples show how much an individual can achieve for the community through active social engagement. Reading these works and searching for the texts related to them, we ourselves become part of the same sociolinguistic narrative network (Filipović, 2018a: 219) as interpreters of social relations shown from the particular positions of the authors.
Eco Anxiety and Necropolitical Dynamics in Jenny Offill’s Weather
Climate change has been recognized as one of the most critical global challenges of the 21st century, not only for its environmental and ecological consequences but also for its serious impact on human health, particularly mental health. One example of how slow, gradual climate change affects individual mental health is the occurrence of ecological anxiety (eco-anxiety) —a psychological response characterized by feelings of helplessness and fear about the future of the planet. This paper explores the concept of ecological anxiety in Jenny Offill’s novel Weather (2020), while situating this phenomenon within the theoretical framework of necropolitics, as articulated by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe. The novel functions as a microcosm for exploring the social, political, and existential dynamics of our time, where climate change intensifies structural inequalities and disproportionally exposes marginalized populations to greater ecological risks. The novel Weather narrates the experience of Lizzie Benson, a woman and a mother living in New York who struggles with anxiety of impending environmental disaster. Through an experimental yet highly relatable narrative structure, Offill weaves a subtle critique of the necropolitical systems that determine who is spared from and who is destined to suffer the consequences of climate change. Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, which extends Foucault’s ideas of biopolitics and biopower, emphasizes the control over life and death. This concept helps us understand how marginalized populations are disproportionally exposed to ecological degradation. This paper analyzes how Offill positions ecological anxiety as a device to explain deeper necropolitical structures. Lizzie Benson’s fear is not personal but symbolic of a larger societal angst, rooted in the unequal distribution of ecological harm: her daily interactions with diverse social groups—from the affluent planning smart escape strategies to marginalized communities who remain vulnerable to climate disasters. The novel subtly states that survival in the face of ecological collapse depends on privilege and access to resources. By situating Weather within the broader context of climate fiction and necropolitical theory, this paper argues that Offill’s work serves both as a literary exploration of ecological anxiety and a critique of the political systems that perpetuate environmental harm. Moreover, Weather challenges readers to reflect on their own complicity in sustaining these systems. Offill’s unique fusion of wit, reflection, and narrative fragmentation captures the complex emotional landscape of living in an age where the future of our planet feels increasingly uncertain.
Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking: Claiming Authority over the Thematization of a Beloved Man’s Death
This paper aims to analyze Joan Didion’s autobiography The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) by considering it as a pioneering effort to assert authority over the representation of female experiences of mourning for a beloved man. Historically, female mourning has often been relegated to unofficial cultural domains or has been depicted through the lens of male authors. Particularly marginalized in this context is the theme of losing a beloved man, whereas, conversely, the death of a beloved woman is one of the more prominent themes in Western literature. The reasons for this primarily lie in the differing perceptions of expressing states of mourning and melancholy depending on gender roles. Therefore, the first part of the paper will highlight the issue of the varying valuation of transposing loss into artistic expression based on whether the authorship is male or female. Starting from Freud’s text “Mourning and Melancholia,” this paper explores feminist post-structuralist readings of his work and then examines Juliana Schiesari’s contributions, which expand the psychoanalytic viewpoint by investigating the broader social and discursive contexts that have shaped our understanding of artistic representations of mourning and melancholy. The second part will focus on the consequences of this difference in Didion’s work, examining how the reception of her genre and narrative choices, as well as the intertextual links within her work, have been influenced by this gendered dynamic. The scholarly reception we have discussed raises questions about the reliability of the female narrative voice and the effectiveness of transposing emotional states into literary text. On the other hand, her autobiography exposes the lack of a female literary tradition and thus problematizes the position of a woman as an author. The references she uses are part of the male literary tradition. Also, there is a complex relationship between her text and her husband’s work that complicates her attempts to establish a distinct, independent voice. The paper interprets the autobiography The Year of Magical Thinking as a work still searching for its place within a literary tradition, characterized by anxiety of authorship particularly in the context of thematizing death of a beloved man, while Joan Didion is considered to be foremother whose work has paved the way for those who have came after her.
This paper discusses Oscar Wildeʼs play The Importance of Being Ernest in the context of developing the individual social and personal identity. Through a comparative analysis of dramatic relations, characterised by ambivalence and a dynamic of the “masculine” and the “feminine”, the paper seeks to establish a relationship to contemporary society, Western culture, and ideas of identity, sexuality, gender, and art. The analysis primarily focuses on the notion of form, both in the context of artistic expression and the expression of personal identity (i.e. truth), as well as its relationship to the idea of pleasure. This is based on observations concerning the surprising topicality of Ernest’s themes in the contemporary social context. Theoretical and methodological support is found in the prominent philosophical and feminist critical thought of the 20th and 21st centuries which significantly influenced the rethinking of Western society and the individual in it. In a broader sense, the said critical thought involves Susan Sontag and Judith Butler’s reflection on beauty, gender, and morality. In a narrower sense, the analysis draws on Luce Irigaray and Michael Foucault’s conclusions about language, gender, sexuality, and (contemporary) social practices. This is briefly laid out in Chapter 1 (“Introduction”). The drama analysis unravels in six points, starting with considering language as an artistic and a social means of expression in Chapter 2 (“To play with wonderful expression”). Chapter 2 briefly examines the connection of beauty with the notions of deceit, vanity, superficiality and thoughtlessness in the Western social subconscious, and its relationship to Wilde’s general poetics. The analysis continues, reflecting on the significance of language and form (Chapter 3: “The absurd importance of language forms”) but also their oppressive qualities, and the potentially repressive and complex relationship between the notions of form and pleasure, a relationship expressed through food symbolism in Wilde’s play (Chapter 4: “The oppressive authority of language forms”). Chapters 3 and 4 explore Oscar Wilde’s take on Victorian social conventions and practices, and the repercussions of language in social and artistic communication. While Chapter 3 comments on the general layout of Wilde’s play and the way its characters interact, Chapter 4 draws on Foucault and Irigaray’s views and insights into the dynamics between institutional power, public morality, and gender (in)equality, to reflect on these concepts concerning the notion of pleasure. Chapter 5 (“Formal repression of pleasure”) continues to explore Wilde’s idea of pleasure, as represented in Earnest, as well as its relationship with utility and what is socially perceived as “masculine” or “feminine” aspects of an individual. Chapter 6 (“An abundance of double exposures”) suggests that everything in The Importance of Being Earnest is doubly exposed and has the potential to create new layers of double exposures. Finally, in Chapter 7 (“Formal pleasure and pleasurable formality – an ‘ideal’ in the age of ideals?”), the analysis concludes with an overview of an ambivalent, i.e., a polyvalent dramatic constellation that leads to the individual creation of a unique, fluid identity (“Ernest”), which comprises both “masculine” and “feminine” aspects and their infinite combinations. In this identity – what might be called identity à la Wilde – the formal and the pleasurable are truly, earnestly intertwined. Chapter 8 (“Conclusion”) further highlights this claim, concluding that the importance of being earnest is the importance of recognising different aspects and accepting social and individual identities as inherently polyvalent phenomena, ever dynamic, fluid, and evolving.
Out of the Frame: The Essay Writing of Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf
The paper examines selected essays by Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf within the social, cultural and artistic context at the turn of the century. The essay, which implies a note of subversion, proves to be the ideal form for these two writers, who have a chameleonic ability to disguise, deceive and seduce the reader. Although apparently Wilde and Woolf had no common points of contact either in life or in literary creation, the analysis of their essays in which they clearly present their view of art and the criticism of the traditional approach to the literature of their contemporaries, in which realism served as a mirror of social reality, points to numerous similarities in understandings of art. Firstly, the influences of Walter Pater and Shakespeare on both authors are analysed, and then the viewpoints regarding the perception of art are compared. Both authors despise the photographic approach to literature, the superficial realism that relies on descriptions, and demand a turn to inner experience, contemplation and memories, looking for a new stylistic expression as well. Satire, which is more pronounced in Wilde, but also present in Woolf, serves as a means of criticizing the traditional patriarchal society, with which both authors point to social problems, and, additionally, in Woolf, to the problems of gender inequality. Both authors have utopian ideas about an ideal society, but at the same time they are aware that they are unrealistic and unachievable. Wilde and Woolf demand the noninterference of politics and morality in literature, they claim it is inappropriate to use literature for political or any similar purposes. Wilde’s aestheticism and decadence represent a step towards a new approach and understanding of art, which will contribute to the development of modernism. His idea of art for art’s sake influenced the aesthetics of the time, just as the modernist views of Virginia Woolf expressed in her essay A Room of One’s Own influenced the artistic climate at the beginning of the twentieth century. She demanded a break with the realistic style of writing, as well as with the traditional understanding of gender roles. Wilde’s claim that life imitates art far more than art imitates life implies that the artist uses his personal experience in creating art and reshaping it, affirming that in every art there is a part of the life of the artist who created it. It is the artist who gives life to beauty. Wilde and Woolf oppose imitation, art requires originality and passion, and each artist seeks his own expressive form, unique and individual. Wilde does not believe in a firm division of genres, but that literature tends to create new genres. Accordingly, Woolf was an advocate of experimental methods in literature, the search for new and original expression, she even tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to write a “novel-essay”. Wilde and Woolf also show similarities regarding the reversed role of reader/critic and writer in the literary process of creation, where the emphasis is placed on the artistic aspect of criticism, that is, reading in order to create new, richer and more diverse works of art. Both authors significantly contributed to the modernist movement, a new understanding of reality, autonomy in the artistic process and individualism. At the same time, their works express the inner experience of people with silenced voices and marginalized in a society that denied them being who they felt they really were. Their suppressed voices of marginalization and otherness had to remain hidden due to strict traditional social norms of the Victorian era.
Before the readers is the fourteenth issue of Knjiženstvo, a journal for studies in literature, gender and culture, launched in 2011 as part of the research project titled Knjiženstvo - Theory and History of Womenʼs Writing in Serbian until 1915, funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia. First of all, we are thrilled that this year the journal Knjiženstvo has been included in the international citation database Scopus. That is great news, as it will significantly increase the visibility and citation of our journal on a global scale. Unfortunately, like last year, we are welcoming this December 2024 with anxiety and disbelief before the “shipwreck of civilizations” that is shaking the whole world. We want to believe that the diverse contributions in this issue will be inspiring to readers and will serve as a necessary guide in the general chaos, reflecting on which direction we can (and must) think, and then act.