480049 SE B.A. Seminar on Literature: Bulgarian, Bosnian / Croatian / Serbian (2023S)

How has novel narration changed in recent decades? And what can be observed in the works of authors Georgi Gospodinov, Teodora Dimova, Saša Stanišič, Barbi Markovič, who are certainly influenced by postmodernism? The continuity of the narrative, the "logical" representation are obviously violated – one does not offer straightforwardly unfolded stories, but rather many-sided fragmentary events that belong to completely different periods of time, and from these the reader should construct a reality for himself.
Whether the descriptive I travels through various corridors of memory and allows itself to be diverted into them (G. Gospodinov "The Physics of Sorrow", 2012; "Time Shelter", 2022), whether the descriptive character is hidden behind the monologue-story insights of the individual novel characters (T. Dimova, "The Mothers", 2006), whether the ages (the Middle Ages, the 2nd World War, the period before and after the fall of communism in 1989 are concentrated in a provincial location, making the story dispersive and difficult to recognise (S. Stanišič, "Before the feast", 2014), whether one produces a narrative in the spirit of Thomas Bernhardt, or effectively masters situations and environments through the static of descriptivity (B. Markovič, "The Superheroines", 2016), again and again the result remains the same: someone narrates, but no consistent story makes itself evident.
As if these well-known authors no longer believe in the causality of an event, but are only interested in the perspective of an occurrence and how one might proceed with it, or are only enraptured by the artifice of thoroughly intricate and labyrinthine writing.
How is this irrefutable effect of literary mediation created will be the topic of discussion in the seminar offered.