Literature as Criticism of Ideology in Contemporary Serbian Culture

Abstract

There is an important new cultural phenomenon in Eastern Europe. For a long time after the Second World War, many Slav literatures (for example, Russian, Polish, Serbian and Czech) were exposed to the influence of Marxist aesthetics and the literary ideology of socialist realism. But in the course of the last twenty years a new literary current has become established — a literature of critical dissatisfaction and resistance. It was from these parts of Europe that many important works of modern literature reached the West, complementing and at the same time modifying the poetics of postmodernism. In contrast to Western ideas of alienation, the absurd and the search for essential and enduring existential topics, cosmic anxiety and flight from politics into a self-enclosed world, radical thought in Eastern Europe has bred a subversive style: a literature of defiance and critical non-acceptance of the ruling ideology and Party culture.