Lecture – Dubravka Đurić: "Hybridity, Violence, and War in Contemporary Post-Yugoslav Female Poetry"

The DFG Center for Advanced Studies “Russian-Language Poetry in Transition” (FOR 2603) cordially invites you to a lecture with Dubravka Đurić streamed live via Zoom. Please register by e-mail with Anna Fees (anna.fees@uni-trier.de) no later than July 5th, 2022, to receive the stream’s access data.

Contemporary poetry has generated a multitude of poetic worlds, locally as well as globally; and the main characteristic of these highly engaging works of art is hybridity. Therefore, I will briefly discuss the work of African-American poet Claudia Rankine, as an influental transnational model of hybrid practice. Then, I will direct my attention to the work of four women writers from the region of former Yugoslavia (Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia): Snežana Žabić (living in the USA), Ana Seferović (living in Great Britain), Ivana Sajko (living in Germany), and Nina Dragičević (living in Slovenia). I will analyse how they articulated their hybrid books, moving between poetry, prose, and drama. Using hybrid forms, they have dealt with a number of highly relevant topics, i.e., the war in former Yugoslavia from different perspectives (Žabić and Sajko), the general experience of war (Seferović), and other forms of violence, above all in contemporary bureaucratic social structures and in the NGO sector (Dragičević).

If a poem is a small machine made out of words, as American modernist William Carlos Williams once explained, I will focus my attention on elements of the machine called a book of poetry, in other words,  on techniques used in building the complex literary constructions of the above-mentioned authors.

In their works they perform the critique of both nationalism and neoliberalism in many fascinating ways. By doing so, they use techniques of transmediation and appropriation with characteristic documentary genres. Last but not least, self-reflexivity has been a common denominator in their artists’ books as well as in their numerous other texts and interviews.

Dubravka Đurić, graduated with a master’s degree from the Department of General Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Belgrade. She obtained her PhD at the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Novi Sad. Currently, she is a professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, where she has been teaching several courses on media studies and popular culture, as well as a course on experimental literature. Since 2015, she has been president of the Serbian Association for Anglo-American Studies. With Miško Šuvaković she has edited Impossible Histories: Avant-Garde, Neo-avant-garde and Post-Avant-Garde in Yugoslavia (Boston: MIT Press, 2003). With Biljana D. Obradović she has edited Cat Painters: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry (New Orleans: Dialogos Press, 2016). She has also translated American poetry with a special focus of language poetry.