Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.38003/zrffs.17.7
Politics in the Novel Unterstadt by Ivana Šojat
Sanja Tadić-Šokac
; University of Rijeka, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Abstract
In the novel Unterstadt, Ivana Šojat alternates stories about personal destinies with stories about official history, thus the narrator emphasizes that the gap between official history and the fate of the heroes of the work is insurmountable. The author thematizes ‘political evils, evils of political power/authority’ in accordance with Ricouer’s point of view, according to which “specific evils develop thanks to politics, which are exactly political evils, the evils of political power/authority.” These evils cannot be subsumed under something else, especially cannot be reduced to economic alienation. In the novel Unterstadt, it is explicitly shown how politics affects members of several generations of a family of German origin. The work established a connection between literature and politics and the political, without jeopardizing the autonomy of the two fields. Many theoreticians write about this literary-theoretical question. Among them, I highlight J. Derrida’s point of view expressed in 1992 in the interview This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida. In it, he sees literature as a modern institution inseparable from the modern institution of democracy. He believes that the author can express whatever they want through literature, while remaining protected from any type of censorship (political, religious, national). This freedom that literature offers the author is “a powerful political weapon, which can nevertheless be neutralized as fiction at a moment’s notice.” In the novel Unterstadt, there is a strong criticism of politics and evil, which mercilessly deal with individuals and entire families in the whirlwinds of historical events. This work by Ivana Šojat is in search of the absent foundations of sociality, and the reader emerges from their own exposure to social phenomena and their illegibility as a subject who smuggles meanings across interpretative boundaries. Unterstadt, once again, warns us and calls us not to forget the horrors that humanity is capable of committing.
Keywords
Ivana Šojat; politics; history; memory; Unterstadt; evil
Hrčak ID:
324151
URI
Publication date:
18.12.2024.
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