Tomislav Ahel, MD, psychiatrist (Community Health Centre of Primorsko-goranska County)
Dr. Brigita Miloš, postdoctoral researcher (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka)
Dr. Dubravka Dulibić-Paljar, senior lecturer (Faculty of Humanities, Juraj Dobrila University of Pula)
On the Symptomatology of Love in Dragojla Jarnević’s Dnevnik
Closely related to the definition of romantic love by Niklas Luhmann, this is an account of the analysis of Dragojla Jarnević’s diary entries (2000). Several broadly posited but tightly intertwined problems thereby come to the fore: first, the problem of the construction of the diaresque narrational I as the suffering self (Foucault); second, the concept of female sexuality through the prism of medical (psychiatric) discourse in the context of diary entries (Nikolić, Kecmanović, Marić, Stahl, Kohut, Lewis, Masterson, Millon); third, the symptomatology of the diaresque passion in the context of romantic love (Luhman, Paz, Primoratz).
Bojana Anđelić, research assistant (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad)
Love Lectures of ‘a Thinking Female’ by Draga Gavrilović
In 1889 Draginja Draga Gavrilović, first Serbian female novelist, published her longest prose work and central work of her opus, her only novel, – Devojački roman. The overall theme of Devojački roman is based on a series of motifs: family, education, parenting, woman, “the female question”, male-female relationship, marriage, love, society, education system, teacher position, life in the countryside. The aim of this paper is to analyze the concept of love of Draga’s heroine – Darinka. Darinka thinks that marriage is based only on genuine mutual love, similar thoughts and world views, as well as similar education. Draga creates an unusual heroine, heroine that is not made in a mold, heroine that thinks, heroine that long and rigorously evaluates her works and practices, a heroine, while rich, did not want to buy a husband and in poverty did not want to sell her love.
Prof. Emeritus Vladimir Biti (University of Vienna / Zhejiang University)
From the Love Triangle to the Love Dirt. Can the Love Get Rid of the Third?
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Asst. Prof. Ivana Brković (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb)
Renaissance Love Codes: Cupid and Love Madness in Marin Držić’s Arcadia
As a subject of different discourses i.e. of philosophy, medicine, society, literature etc., romantic love was a widespread and important concept in the Renaissance Europe but not without inherent ambiguity. In literature, this is underscored by the genre of pastoral drama, the fictional world of which features love as the main principle. Being a frame of reference for a potentially multiple symbolism, the Arcadian space of the pastoral, its plot and characters under the influence of Cupid’s arrows invariably imply a paradoxical nature of love, in alignment with Neo-Platonic philosophy or the idea of erotic dualism.
In this paper, I will be focusing on the pastoral Renaissance drama in Dubrovnik, by Marin Držić in particular, in an attempt to examine to what extent his pastorals exploit the comic potential of the conflict between low/sexual and high/courtly love ( Venus Vulgaris vs. Venus Coelestis ), as well as its moral undertones (in the sense of possible modes of reconciliation of the two types of love). In addition, the construct of love will be considered with respect to its social connotations, related to a wedding as an occasion for the pastorals’ performances and a social rite of passage (romantic vs. marital love).
Dr. Lidija Delić, senior research associate (Institute for Literature and Arts, Beograd)
The Unbearable Lightness of Love. Vladan Matijevićʼs Maca Aksentijević as a New Type of Femme Fatale
In the focus of the analysis will be selected works of Ivo Andrić (Omer Pasha Latas; Jelena, the Woman of My Dream, Anikaʼs Times), Bora Stankovićʼs Koštana and the novel Moments/Lessons of Joy by Vladan Matijević, the least noticed book in the opus of writer awarded by NINʼs, Andrićʼs and Selimovićʼs Prize, probably because of lascivious and “uncensored” language close to the pornography, generally stigmatized from the standpoint of the canon. The corpus is formed to represent three types of fatal female attraction. While Stanković and Andrić adhere to the romantic concept of femme fatale (“she can do everything, but wantʼs nothing”, Omer Pasha Latas), Matijević profiles a heroine who binds men to herself not by mystery, but by sexuality. Her cheerful giving to body pleasures, at the cost of reflexive and emotional life, is exclusive not only in the prose of Vladan Matijević. This sexuality is equally attractive to men as exceptional beauty (as cultural) and mystery (as a genre) construct of fatal (female) seducer in literary and film narratives. Unconstrained sexuality, as a source of happiness, offers an alternative to the dominant discourse in Western European thought about sexuality (Epstein, Bataille, Baudrillard) and a new type of femme fatale.
Dr. Ivana Drenjančević, postdoctoral researcher (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb)
Asst. Prof. Marina Protrka Štimec (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb)
Salvation of a Slave. Love Figures in Tin Ujević’s Early Poetry
First two collections of Tin Ujević’s poems “Cry of the Slave” (Lelek sebra, 1920) and “The Necklace” (Kolajna, 1926), previously conceptualised as one, on a quotational and intertextual level consistently interrelate with a conventions of troubadour poetry and with a long lasting romantic understanding of a pain as a “negative excess” that should be, through an infinite rebellion, converted into an “affirmative excess”. In our paper we will discuss Ujević’s dialogical attempt toward these literary conventions and his ability to reinvent new vision of love as a truth procedure that is, according A. Badiou, demarking sign of the 20th Century culture and literature.
Prof. Matthias Freise (University of Göttingen)
Laza Kostić’s dream of Love, Seen through the Analysis of Form
No epoch believed so much in love for its own sake as romanticism. The Serbian romantic poet Laza Kostić is appreciated for his complex intercultural poem “Santa Maria della Salute” and for his metapoetic reflections on poetry. Quantitatively, however, love poetry occupies a considerable space in his work. The most prominent publication on Laza Kostić’s love poetry, Bojislav Ćurić’s essay “Ljubavna lirika Laze Kostića”, certifies Kostić a largely immature and clichéd love poetry, with the exception of few masterpieces such as “Samson i Delila” and “Snove snivam”. The latter, however, Ćurić sees entirely in the context of Novalis. Overall, Ćurić does not strive for an analysis of form, which is very worthwhile, however, especially at Kostić, since his metapoetic poems and essays show his high awareness of form. I will examine poems with regard to their semantics which show particularly concise formal features: the early poem “Dakle tako” and the two dream poems “Snio sam te” and “Snove snivam”.
Asst. Prof. Dolores Grmača (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb)
Fatal Seduction and/or Sacred Love: Mary Magdalene in South-Slav Literatures
As one of the most intriguing Biblical characters, Mary Magdalene has become an artistic archetype of a penitent prostitute, passionate in love both while sinning and after the conversion. This paper will outline the representations of the character of Mary Magdalene in South-Slav literatures form the earliest apocrypha to contemporary novels, demonstrating how this character was gradually transformed from the secular ideal of femme fatale into the symbol of sinfulness, and finally, as a repentant figure, into a saint. Mediaeval and renaissance texts represented Magdalene as an ascetic penitent (apocrypha, Marulić), while the Baroque transformed her into an alluring penitent, blending her amorous nostalgia with erotic descriptions of her penitent infatuation with the heavenly lover (BunićVučić, Đurđević). Interpretations of the Magdalen figure in the specific contexts allowing for the conversion of Amor carnalis into Amor spiritualis changed in the early 20th century, in modernist dramas which represented Magdalene as a fatal seducer, turning her erotic love into a temptation for Christ (Krleža, Galović), and her seductive charm into the main motive for Judas’ betrayal (Strozzi). Contemporary novels, on the other hand, have turned their focus to her inner split between carnal love and service to sacred love (Popović), her spiritual search is marked by fatal seduction (Mlakić), and her story is also a struggle for emancipation and rejection of a life with no name (Stojisavljević). This research is theoretically grounded in feminist criticism, and, in particular, in feminist theology which emphasises the paradoxical transformation of the story of Mary of Magdalene, as the most important female figure in the nearest circle of Jesus’ disciples and followers, from the position of the first witness of his resurrection into a paradigmatic figure of a penitent harlot.
Prof. Miranda Jakiša (Humboldt University of Berlin / Institute for Slavic Studies, University of Vienna)
Red Love – Milovan Djilas’ Love Stories
The talk explores the entanglement of love ideals with concepts of society in Yugoslav literature. In his Anatomy of a Moral and in a number of other love stories Milovan Djilas, “budući da ni ljubav ne postoji kao nešto izdvojeno iz društva”, analyzes the course that love took within Yugoslav Communist Elites. Fuelled by revolutionary idealisms and in negotiations with new concepts of “Free Love” as well as with the patriarchal society Djilas’ love narratives illustrate the rise and fall of “Red Love” in Yugoslavia.
Dr. Bernarda Katušić (Institute for Slavic Studies, University of Vienna)
Information ‘I love you’ – Archetype and/or Stereotype of Love?
Deliberating the phenomenon of romantic love in the context of constitution of modern, functionally differentiated social formations, N. Luhmann does not define it as a feeling, but rather a “symbolically generalized communication medium” based on which lovers can “express, formulate, stimulate, attribute and negate” (1982) their feelings. Contrary to other forms of communication which are based on verbal and rational practices, the medium of romantic love functions according to the principle of “coupling of information,” in the process repudiating any “objective” message. Since romantic love begins at the moment when the two people in love begin to interpret their relationship as one of love, information I love you functions as the most obvious and the most explicit message about their relationship. This statement of love, often interpreted as an archetype or a distinctive performative (Barthes 1977), is paradoxically simultaneously the simplest and the most complex way to express love. As no other message, this one, once verbalized initiates an unrelenting process, it connotes all additional expressions and activities it those of love; demolishing the old rules it creates something completely new, something which, once it is verbalized, becomes the most trivial stereotype of all. Therefore, lovers, in order to transmit the message credibly, often reach for various non-verbal evidence, signals and gestures. Literary abstracts thrive on ambiguous semantics of the above mentioned symbols of love. The analyses of selected texts from different periods of recent Croatian literary history (Šenoa, Kovačić, Ugrešić) will reveal how love is expressed in them. The verbal expression of I love you will be interpreted in relation to the empty places where it is expected, but not actually spoken.
Prof. Zvonko Kovač (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb)
Semantics of Love in the Cycles and Collections of Poems in South Slavic Poetry Entitled “Love”
Building up on the author’s previous research and analysis of the poems in South Slavic poetry entitled “Love” (http://centerslo.si/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/SSJLK-53_Kova%C4%8D_2.pdf), the inquiry follows up with the cycles and collections of poems in South Slavic poetry of the 20th century entitled “Love”. The assumptions and expectations are geared towards revealing, describing and, ultimately, slackening of “the romantic amorous code,” which gives way to a new “definition” of love, such as can be glimpsed from the contemporary postmodernist poetry and the extant literature: Über die Liebe, Eds H. Meier, G. Neumann; L. Kipnis, Against Love, A Polemic; P. Bruckner, Le paradoxeamoureux: Essai, etc.
Asst. Prof. Ivana Latković (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb)
Symbolic Coding of Modernistic Narrative of (Romantic) Love
Based on the gradually deflection from the traditional norm of the realistic novel and the accompanying values of the growing citizen society, the paper analyses three novels Gospa Judit by Ivan Cankar, Propali dvori by Janko Leskovar and Nečista krv by Borislav Stanković, his representational modus of love relations, especially with regard to their modernist potential to win the space of authentic individual in the context of decomposing by tradition established models of regulating the intimacy zone. Additionally, considering that in these novels love narratives are directly involved in the depiction of decomposing social structures, the paper also explores overturns and reaches of (romantic) love, especially its leading role in alternative worlds of self. Accordingly, an analysis of the three novels will try to establish a possible recognizable form of modernistic narrative of love precisely on the basis of their autonomy towards the discursive occupying code of social stratification.
Assoc. Prof. Perina Meić (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Mostar)
Josip Mlakić’s Literary Sublimation – some notes on the novel “Bezdan” (“The Abyss”)
The paper deals with Josip Mlakić’s latest novel – Bezdan. Central to the novel is the story of two retired couples facing the same problem – the disease of forgetfulness, the Alzheimer's. The couples of different social status live their lonely lives in retirement reduced to common life patterns and rituals. Their alienation is multiple, most obviously manifested in the inability to establish quality communication with the closest. The novel is based on the idea of metaphor which transforms our experience with words and their meanings. The play of empty markers is opened to semiotic processes in which the constant interplay between memory and forgetfulness, conscious and unconscious proves the most effective. The author tells the story of two couples relying mostly on the poetics of the film that inspired him at all levels of the text. The first part of the novel was used as a script for the film titled The Names of the Cherry
Dr. Andrea Milanko, postdoctoral researcher (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb)
Dr. Ana Tomljenović, postdoctoral researcher (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb)
Unmaking Love: Begović and Krleža
Milan Begović published his first novel Dunja u kovčegu in 1921, continuing on the path of erotic and love discourse he had set his foot on by his book of poetry Knjiga Boccadoro in 1900. A year after this publication Miroslav Krleža published his first (love) novel Tri kavaljera frajle Melanije, subtitling it “An old-fashioned story from the time Croatian modern literature was dying”. Although both of these authors were privately bound by friendship, poetically they diverged significantly. Moreover, Krleža criticized the “old-fashioned” love discourse, whose prominent proponent was his very friend Begović. Krleža’s disapproval can be read in his 1920s dramatic pieces, most notably in the Glembays; Leone is doing nothing but demonstrating how juridical, medical and religious discourse do not correspond with the truth, while in Leda Urban unmakes the love discourse and the discourse of art critique. Krleža’s story of Melanija is guided by a strong hand of an extra-diegetic narrator, later to be somewhat softened in the novel The Return of Filip Latinovicz. Begović’s narrator does not keep distance from his characters, using profusely free indirect speech technique, but in the competition-winning novel Giga Barićeva (1930–31) he would revert to less modern techniques of narration. The free indirect speech gives insight into narcissism of Begović’s main character Dušan, but it also allegedly supports an all-too common idea that this novel is lyrical and anti-historical, as opposed to Krleža’s anti-lyric (for its parodic style) and historical (economic and political instability in the wake of the WWI). By a comparative analysis of Begović’s and Krleža’s (anti)love discourse, we will demonstrate in our paper how literature subverts love and economic doxa.
Asst. Prof. Predrag Mirčetić (Faculties of Social Sciеnces and Humanities, University of Belgrade)
After Love
The paper analyzes the motive of love in the story of Borisav Stanković “The Faded Rose”. In the first part the author analyzes the relationship between love and sex since love is presented primarily as eros through body and lust images. In the second part relationship of love and society is analyzed because the class differences are presented as an obstacle in the path of realization of love. The last part examines the relationship between love and marriage, and above the position of a woman within patriarchal morality. In conclusion the author shows why the ideal of romantic love is impossible in reality and presents what remains after love.
Irina Pravdina, doctoral student (Georg-August-University of Göttingen)
The inconsistency of love in Vesna Parun’s poetry book “Crna maslina”
The subject of research in the article is the inconsistency of love in Vesna Parun’s poetry book “Crna maslina”. The process of variability of the motive of love in different texts from the collection is of particular interest.For a detailed consideration of this process, a structural analysis of several poems was performed and equivalence types at different levels of the text were revealed.
Asst. Prof. Evelina Rudan (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb)
Love in the Era of Oral Literary Genres
The paper deals with the breakthroughs of individuality in oral literary genres, which, in the researchers’ perception function as genres of high typification of characters and high stereotypization of relationships among them. These genres and their concrete actualizations were developed mostly in the Pre-Modern times, hence before introducing the concept of a person “as a unique and free individual” (Lenz 1998). The paper will try to show that the breakthroughs of individuality have been occurring specifically in the area of symbolic coding of love and intimacy. Usually, ballads are the genre whose actualization of the tragic often takes place in the context of the conflicts between individual needs (and/or yearnings) and social norms and values, but these needs are more frequently for more security, for example the need for home, (Rudan, Tomašić 2015), than for romantic love. Epic poems, on the other hand, establish primarily the concept of heroes and important events, so searching for the concept of love in them seems, in advance, like an undertaking doomed to failure. For the first case, the love in ballads, on the example of the most famous ballad, Asanaginica, the author will attempt to prove that the tragic end of the heroine is not only the result of the conflicts within the rigid patriarchal social order, but also of the conflict between the two shy breakthroughs of individuality of its two main protagonists. Furthermore, it will be shown that the epic poem Arvatka divojka u carevoj vojsci is not just an epic poem about a heroine from some catalog with an internationally widespread motif of a girl warrior, but also an epic poem, which, from the perspective of a male character, very bashfully, but still embodies the concept of love as a partnership.
Dr. Mirko Sardelić (Department of Historical Research, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts; Centre for the Study of Emotions in Cross-Cultural Exchange)
A Cultural Framework for Romantic Love: Early Modern Croatian Examples
In an attempt to clarify the notion of romantic love, V. Karandashev proposes (among others) that it is “actually a set of mental associations, which people develop in their minds around sex and a prospective sexual partner.” (Karandashev 2017, 278) As such, this set of associations is both individually and, arguably even more, culturally determined. The culture of a poet-lover provides a spatiotemporal framework for love which then the poet respects, enriches, sometimes even contests. European Middle Ages, for example, developed the dualistic opposition: selfish desire vs selfless “true love”; the latter being celebrated and idealized for centuries. This paper discusses some challenges of interpretation of love poetry. In order to soundly analyze the literary works written by an individual of another epoch and culture, scholars need to use a set of complex methodological tools devised by literary and cultural historians, anthropologists, psychologists, philologists… In this paper, some aspects of cultural history and history of emotions will be proposed, and applied to several examples of 16th- and 17th-century Croatian love poetry. The observed categories will belong to both poetic (e.g. cultural references to Petrarch(ists) or Neoplatonists) and socio-political realm (e.g. the provenance of authors).
Assoc. Prof. Bojana Stojanović Pantović (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad)
Love for Prostitute: Modification or Deconstruction of the Romantic Love?
In the frame of the diachronic modifications and altered conditions of the “general structure” of romantic love (Luhmann 1982), the representation of love for prostitutes is one of the key topoi of European avant-garde movements, especially in German-Austrian expressionism and French surrealism. The figure of “public, deprived woman” have been perceived both by feminists (Franziska zu Reventlow, Emmy Hemmings), and also by Expressionist male writers and artists as a sexual, passive object that symbolizes a kind of the “urbanisation of the body”. It refers to love as a commodity (Schönfeld 1997, 2010) in the process of new bourgeois economic-market relations. In this sense, Serbian and Croatian writers of the mentioned period also shape the stereotypical dichotomy of the woman as a harlot and a saint or mother, which will be analysed on the examples of the prose of Miloš Crnjanski and Miroslav Krleža. In terms of gender identity, such love points to a weak or alternative masculinity that longs for romantic ideal love, but is most often found in the prostitute.
Assoc. Prof. Dragana Vukičević (Faculties of Social Sciеnces and Humanities, University of Belgrade)
The Parody of Sentimentalistic and Romantic Love Narratives in Serbian Prose of the 19th Century
Since the parody includes both the imitation and the negation of the parodied text, keeping in mind the analysis of the parodic and humorous prose in Serbian literature of the 19th century, we will try to construct: 1. sentimentalistic and romantic love narrative; 2. their counternarratives. We will follow the conventions that stabilized these narratives and the ways of their later deconstruction: love at first glance, love for love’s sake, love and death, eternal love, love and passion, love and war, bitter love (amare amaro), love as illness, delayed or deferred gratification. The corpus of texts on which we will base our research includes the prose of Jovan Sterija Popović, Jakov Ignjatović, Laza Lazarević and Stevan Sremac, as well as intertextual connections with Cervantes’s Dulcinea (Don Quixote), Goethe’s Werther, romantic poetry by Laze Kostić... We will compare the concept of mystical lovers formed by Denis de Rougemont ( L’Amour et l’Occident, translated as “Love in the Western World”) with Niklas Luhmann’s concept of love (Liebe als Passion: Zur Codierung von Intimität – “Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy”).