A two-day conference that aims to critically examine the performative force of Ugrešić’s writing and to further the discussion of its local and global effects.
A literary voice of transplanted and translated subject, Dubravka Ugrešić epitomizes a transnational European writer. Ugrešić lives across different borders and divisions, between East and West, European North and South, European and not-yet-European spaces within the geography of Europe, as well as between languages (she writes in Croatian, or Croato-Serbian but her texts appear in other languages, such as Dutch or English), participating in the everyday life, cultures, and political processes of two or more nation states. Rather than by her experience of displacement and exile, Ugrešić’s transnational writer’s profile is shaped by the very repertoire of the privileged themes of her writing—questions of identity, gender, memory, and language, feelings of loss and trauma—and, even more so, by her use of the attentive critical language able to swiftly cut through the literary tissue of national canons and cultural myths.
This conference takes place October 22nd and 23rd.
New York City, NY; NYC