Text

theses

The dissertation is a study of postmodern Serbian and Greek novels that reflect the most recent historical trauma in the Balkans. The texts I analyze in specific chapters are Eugenia Fakinou's The Seventh Garment (1983), Milorad Pavi's The Dictionary of the Khazars (1984), Rhea Galanaki's The Life of Ismail Ferik-Pasha (1989), and David Albahari's Bait (1996). The appropriation of the term 'mythistory' as a key concept in defining the postmodern narratives analyzed in my dissertation derives from the absence of a clear distinction between mythological and historical national origins. In the Serbian texts analyzed interrogations of history feature as the dominant narrative mode, while even in historically informed Greek texts mythical subtext often figures as the cardinal referent. A possible reason for such a broad appropriation of myth lies in the claim of late 18th-century Greek nationalists to the classical glory of Ancient Greece.
This liaison enabled the closure of the gap between the classical period of, predominantly mythically informed, Greek antiquity and post-Ottoman Greek modernity. The pagan content of mythical antiquity became successfully subsumed under the Christian context and thus unified entered the service of national literature.
My contextualization of mythistory, both within Greek women's postmodern fiction and Serbian postmodern narratives uncovers its complex involvement with the national issue.
However, as my dissertation clearly shows, it is not only a persuasive rhetoric of nationalism, but also a narrative style that subtly promotes the political without propagandist intentions. Instead, in the texts analyzed emerge very distinct agendas of gender, identity, culture, philosophy, and aesthetics, all interwoven with the national problematic, but steering away from the definition by which mythistory is relegated to the transparently propagandist. Moreover, my dissertation defends the position that postmodernist Serbian and Greek literature, inclining towards the postcolonial interrogation of history rather than the more playful postmodern style employed in western literatures, engages the mythistorical narrative approach as a critical alternative to classical national allegories and organicist foundation narratives.

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 224-231).

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.13488

ETD_201

doi:10.7282/T35M664D

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.