Outline of major developments in Serbian (including Montenegrin) and Croatian (including Dalmatian) literatures from the beginnings to the present. No knowledge of Serbian/Croatian required.

Following its break with the Soviet Union in 1948, a small Balkan country once known as Yugoslavia began to develop its own alternative model of socialism. In economic and political terms, this led to the formation of market socialism, development of workers’ self-management, and creation of the Non-Aligned Movement—an alliance of formerly colonized states unwilling to side with either of the two Cold War superpowers. The impact of Yugoslavia’s distinct approach to socialism was felt even more in the sphere of cultural production, where modernism (rather than socialist realism) became a state-sponsored aesthetic. Yugoslavia became a rare socialist state to foster artistic experimentation and invest in new forms of expression, giving birth to a historically unique form of socialist modernism across the fields of literature, film, theatre, music, architecture, performance art and more. In this course we will focus primarily on the form socialist modernism took in Yugoslav literature over almost half a century of its existence. We will read the works of Miroslav Krleža, Ivo Andrić, Meša Selimović, Aleksandar Tišma, Danilo Kiš, Dubravka Ugrešić, and Milorad Pavić. All readings are in English and no prior of knowledge of South Slavic history or literature is required.

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Requirements class fulfills