UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference
Inclusion Exclusion
Saturday 18 February
2:30 – 4:00: Panel K4:
Literary Trends
Anca Baicoianu (University of Bucharest): ‘Remembrance of things past:
identity narrations in post-Communist literatures’
The main topic of this paper is to compare and contrast three contemporary novels (two of them belonging to the Romanian writers Mircea Nedelciu and Norman Manea, and the third to the Croatian Dubravka Ugrešić), focusing on the ways in which memory and history relate with the narrative and the process of identity (re)construction, with a special attention given to the ways in which the personal and social identity is shaped by means of inclusion-exclusion mechanisms. My aim is to identify, in spite of the diversity of the narrative strategies and identity projects at work in these novels (a diversity resulting from ethnic, religious, historical and gender differences) a specific treatment of this relationship. As I see it, this specificity can be explained by means of two sets of causes: the postmodern dismissal of the traditional understanding of history as a coherent and continuous "grand narrative" (and of memory as its replica at a personal level), and the radical change that "scar cultures" (especially the postcolonial and the post-communist) have brought about in our comprehension of the complex processes of identity formation.
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