The Concept of Statelessness in Second-World Literature

Abstract

My dissertation is a comparative study of the mutually constitutive relationship between homelessness as a cultural worldview and statelessness as a political condition. By focusing on socialist Yugoslavia (1945-1991), I examine how the modernist theme of homelessness—once viewed as an expression of cosmopolitan aspirations among its most progressive writers—turns into a devastating everyday reality for those rendered genuinely stateless in the course of the Yugoslav wars. My point of departure is the high modernist prose of Danilo Kiš, the so-called “last Yugoslav writer,” whose work is widely thought to have presaged a future yet to be lost in the break-up of this region. By returning to Kiš’s fictionalized autobiographical trilogy—Early Sorrows (1970), Garden, Ashes (1965), and Hourglass (1972)—I show how Kiš develops a philosophy of history in which homelessness is the metaphysical, historical, and formal problem he tries to work through rather than posit as an essential human condition. The importance of rethinking the paradigmatic status of the apatride figure is highlighted in chapters two and three, where I show a post-Yugoslav constellation emerging in world literature around the idea of bezdomnost—a term used explicitly in reference to Martin Heidegger’s Heimatlosigkeit (existential homelessness), and thematized by a number of post-Yugoslav authors, including Aleksandar Hemon and Dubravka Ugrešić. What comes into view here is a nexus of transnational works centered less on a set of shared experiences than on a common belief in the representational, explanatory, and civic virtues of homelessness and its power to contest nativism—now on a global scale. In contrast to Hemon’s “audacity of despair,” I return in the dissertation’s final chapters to the “dialectic of hope” in the writings of the WWII generation of German émigré scholars. I propose that the exiled members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory—in their sustained critique of the excesses of existentialism—remain as relevant today for a literary study of political demise as they once were for the study of fascism and nihilism.