Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.17234/Croatica.68.2
SLOBODAN NOVAK’S ILLYRIA REDUX
Tatjana Jukić
orcid.org/0000-0002-2679-6866
; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Drawing on references to "Twelfth Night" in Slobodan Novak’s "Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh" ("Mirisi, zlato i tamjan", 1968), mostly when the feast of Epiphany is invoked, I have already argued that no less than the modern chronotope of Novak’s novel is overdetermined by Shakespeare’s Illyria, as well as the novel’s narrative outline (Jukić 2006: 92-94, 2011: 317-320). In this essay I show how Novak’s Illyria entails a distinctly Shakespearean political theology, inflected as Croatian modernity is in an Illyrian imaginary (Collegium Illyricum; Napoleon’s Illyrian Provinces; the Illyrian Movement). It is a political theology based in the idea of parthenogenesis, I argue: a point from which to reconsider Carl Schmitt’s reading of Shakespeare in "Hamlet or Hecuba" ("Hamlet oder Hekuba", 1956), and its derivation from Schmitt’s political theory.
Keywords
Slobodan Novak; William Shakespeare; Illyria; political theology; the novel; modernity; parthenogenesis
Hrčak ID:
325631
URI
Publication date:
30.12.2024.
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