Academic literature on the topic 'Serbian Narrative poetry'

The analysis of relation between the poor and the concept of charity in Serbian epic poetry is initiated as part of the research project "Ethnic and social stratification of the Balkans", which includes study of social margins and subcultures in oral literature. Charitable activities directed toward the poor are discussed as social models, but also as a complex way of social interaction between the elites and the poor, which left its mark on oral tradition and epic poetry. Care for the poor, almsgiving and charitable deeds were a religious obligation, and in the course of time, the repetitiveness and habitual character of poor relief became an important issue in structuring cultural patterns. Ethical, educative and humanistic potential of charity, and its being founded on cases witnessed in real life directly connect charity to the shaping of poetic narrative models. Epic models reflect and poeticize socio-cultural patterns and characters, which is represented both in medieval documents and in epic tradition, in similarity of their themes and formulas on the level of contents and structure. This resemblance has led to the conclusion that charitable giving, care for the poor and salvation of soul existed as specific patterns and intergeneric symbols, which were handed down in various oral and written forms.

AbstractA critical account of the Serbian poem in Goethe's conversations with Eckermann reveals the place of Balkan folk poetry in the discourse on world literature and adds a neglected narrative to the myriad genealogies of comparative literature. Building on Laura Doyle's concept of inter-imperiality, the essay foregrounds how language politics manifest the variegated contours Europe takes in Goethe's formulation of world literature. While recent scholarship in comparative literature largely examines Goethe's Eurocentrism through his invocation of an unnamed Chinese novel, an analysis of the inter-imperial and translational project of world literature gives form to multiple spheres of Orientalism.

By applying ethno-symbolist approach in studying premodern ethnic community shaping, this article analyzes the role of the most important saintly, martyr and heroic figures of the Serbian folk epics in development of the Serbian ethnicity up to the nineteenth century. This symbolic content was viewed through the prism of the theoretical concept of ethno-history, i.e. as a part of a complex ethnic narrative which contains different parts of myths and historical memories of members of an ethnie. Special attention was given to explanation of social conditions which were, in historical perspective, defining character of collective memory of premodern Serbs. Findings of the researches showed that epic characters of Prince Lazar, Milos Obilic, and Prince Marko, as well as protagonists of poems about Serbian battles against Ottoman Empire from the beginning of the nineteenth century, originated as a result of different group interests and needs initiated by political, cultural and economic features of the time when the poetry was made. By the same token, historical role of the Serbian church, as well as the influence of centuries of social subordination of the members of Serbian ethnic community during the Ottoman reign. Findings of this analysis leads to a conclusion that building of an ethnical identity, as a rule, is not a linear and spontaneous process, marked with continual accumulation of memories, and its development is defined with the moments of collective forgetting, much needed for the survival of the group.

This paper analyses achievements of Serbian cinematography after 2000, which narrative strategies and visual aesthetics are focused on the issues of violence and victims in the context of social despair, post-communist transition and ongoing global value crisis. Films made by Mladen Djordjevic Life and Death of a Porn Gang (2009), Srdjan Spasojevic A Serbian Movie (2010), and Marko Novakovic Menagerie (2012) integrate these complex characteristics of disintegration of Serbian community and dysfunctional state system into their cinematic poetics. These films present examples of radical film aesthetics, which, through strategies of making things unusual, and the influence of underground, pornography and horror on the realistic drama, speak about permanently traumatised Serbian society. They directly connect collective political state and the domain of personal, family, intimate and sexual, controversially relying on the images and narratives of gender misogyny and the violence it produces and its victims. The paper critically approaches these issues from the gender- feminist perspective.

This study concerns the relationship between verbal and musical components of Serbian epic songs with rhythm seen as a morphological dominant. My aim is to enrich the musicological inquiry of this issue and provide a contribution that complements existing folkloristic and philological research outcomes. In terms of methodology, the study promotes the necessity of recording the performers? recited versions of songs for the purposes of investigating the relationships between verbal and musical communication, as well as an interdisciplinary approach to these issues. Two paradigmatic examples are examined, each performed by the guslar representative of his respective period of guslar practice: Tanasije Vucic (1883-1937) and Bosko Vujacic (b. 1947). The observed periods span less than one century, yielding an insignificant passage of time in terms of epic historicism, but nonetheless indicate significant differences between these two guslars? sung and narrated rhythms. Compared to Vujacic, Vucic?s singing demonstrates a considerably smaller range of the absolute duration of the sung syllables (and therefore of an entire verse), and subsequently a much stricter syllabicity. Furthermore, Vucic?s singing reflects the ideal type of ?isochronous pulse in duple meter? in a rather high degree, while Vujacic more consistently refers to narration, whereas the trochaic tendency is noticeable only at the initial part of the verse. The connections between these focused individual styles are discussed through the lens of guslars? transition from amateur to professional capacity and the changed function of epics. Considering the consequences of the policy of invalid representation and experiencing epic song as poetry (void of musical component), and on the other hand, the effects of the strategy insistent on ?citatory? (verbatim) treatment of poetic templates that leads to suppressing poetic creativity, I intend to draw attention of the responsible authorities in the areas of education, culture, and science. This is of particular importance in the context of ongoing endeavors towards preservation of singing with gusle as part of Serbian inherent cultural heritage.

This paper explains the musical treatment of the hymnographic genres within the Serbian chanting practice. As it is known, the original Byzantine poetic structure written in verse — which was in perfect unity with the Byzantine chant concerning the rhythm and meter — was lost in Church-Slavonic translations. The Slavonic hymnography in prose inevitably caused modification of the music language, i.e. establishing of the new bond between the word and a tone. Accordingly, a creative practise of “tailoring” the church melodies to the structure and semantics of the particular hymnographic genre occurred within Serbian chanting practise. Eventually, many songs from the Octoechos, General Chanting, as well as certain songs of the Festal Chanting, gained the status of the “fixed” chants, the proof of which are the first Serbian chanting collections from the 19th century written in staff notation. In these chants semantics and music are set in a specific manner and they represent a model by which the chanters govern themselves while singing other church hymns. Ideal unity of hymnography and music in the fixed chants is reflected in coinciding of textual and music phrases. Such an ideal balance contributes to the clear transmission of the hymnographic content to the faithful. However, sticheras, irmoses, troparions and kontakions which lack the ideal balance, may cause the hymnographic narration and, at some places, even the theological points to be incomprehensible and imprecise. To creative chanters it is an opportunity to “tailor”, i.e. to reinterpret the chants in order to compensate for these imperfections. Such a creative interpretation is possible only by skilled chanters who, above all, thoroughly understand the meaning and structure of a particular hymnographic work. Amongst such chanters were some of the bishops and patriarchs of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Certain chants related to this problem are examined in this paper.

The majority of studies on the last story in Pekić’s gothic novel The New Jerusalem (Serbian: „Luče Novog Jerusalima”, officially translated in English by Zorica Đergović Joksimović ”The Lights of The New Jerusalem 2999”) elaborate on in it in terms of: poetic/narrative auto-referentiality, gothic chronicle, hybrid genre, meta- textuality, historiographic metafictional narrativity, eschatological vision, negative utopia, chiliastic tone, post-apocalyptic vision etc. However, what is to be noted as well is that Pekić’s rhetoric keeps insisting on the same archetypal anthropological matrix, insomuch as it insists on the human species. Pekić’s and our gothic chronicle represents the apocalyptic anthropos. Hence, the paper deals with the same revers- ible process of archeological excavation of „the apocalyptic future” both, within the context of Derrida’s „apocalypse of the apocalypse”, and Milić’s theses on Apocalypse as a never-ending invention of Secret. Given the aforementioned, as well as the paper’s theses, if the conclusion of a sort might be derived it would thus be roughly reduced to phantasmagoric space of Pekić’s rhetorical mask of as equally phantasmagoric apocalyptic and atemporal discourse.

The main characteristic of the novel Petruša i Miluša by Petar Sarić is an elaborate narrative scheme in the form of two voices, mother's and daughter's, two stories that flow and intertwine, and build a third-a story about a story. With this novel and its specific structure, Sarić, on one hand, continued the formal refinement that begun in his previous novels. On the other hand-on the issue of basic poetic-philosophical assumption connected to the question of personal and general (metaphysical) human guilt-he went further concerning both his creative work and the entire Serbian prose with similar thematic preoccupations. The Dionysian principle is represented by the imperatives of the body, the laws of blood, and Petruša's instinctive reaction, through her unrestrained nature that, at the same time, strives for self-renewal and self-destruction. It is a form of the female principle-creative and destructive at the same time, dark, chthonic as opposed to Miluša's Apollonian orientation, worshiping of light, and her mental illumination. Petruša i Miluša is not a model of a family novel (although it can be assumed). Still, in Sarić's novel, the family is just a focus into which the courses of overall existence converge and in which things are condensed and reflected by their true dimensions. This fact is not at all surprising bearing in mind his previous novels (Sutra stiže Gospodar, and especially Dečak iz Lastve), Sarić has already proved himself as a writer who searches for the deepest secrets of human nature, introducing a reader to the dark realm of the human soul, which is shaped according to his artistic creation and creative intuition.

The genesis of these poems links them to places as diverse as Horse Lake and Zigzag Creek, Oregon, sometimes in quest for monsters such as the mythic Ogopogo in Lake Okanagan in the same part of America. Klan Country may be less unspoilt and scenic than the above-mentioned Oregonian sites, but is part of a Trans American journey, and such places as Mala Ivanča, Serbia, Ahwaz, Iran or Mt. Fujimidai, Japan, although scattered over the globe, coexist in John Quinn’s “chronotopic poetic imaginary,” as it were. The poet has shared his poems with us, but he has also challenged us to explore remote places on our own, once the reading of these poems is done. He invites us to explore the wilderness and its wildlife, in addition to his poetic vision.