The concept of corporeality in contemporary Serbian and Montenegrin prose: from interpretation to “immersion” in the text

Abstract

Today’s theory, as well as literary fiction, which is usually most sensitive to changes in worldview, capture an evident fusion of mental and corporeal components in 21st-century culture. Being stated by numerous theorists, the “end of postmodernism” brings a new sensual dominant to the culture. The article demonstrates an existing tendency in today’s Serbian and Montenegrin prose to depict a special type of “integral corporeality”, a phenomenon in which mental and psycho-emotional processes occur and are described only through the body and in bodily terms. This demonstrates the integrity of the external and internal, which, in contrast to the postmodernist sense of disconnection and fragmentation of life, testifies to a new integrity in culture and worldview. That is the research problem. Focusing on an analysis of the works of three Serbian and Montenegrin writers, David Albahari, Slobodan Tišma, and Ognjen Spahić, the author of the article is, however, inclined to believe that such a process of unification of the body with emotions, feelings, and, often, socio-cultural context is a direct reflection of the modern tendency to move from intellectual comprehension of the world and its mental interpretation towards a certain “immersion” in the world, or an integration involving sensation instead of remote analysis. That is, the concept of corporeality and its reflecting in literary fiction are part of a broader and more global process of changing the worldview paradigm in general, and changing the approach to interacting with the world. The author tries to trace this connection of literature with socio-cultural shifts. Thus, the aim of the study is to consider the mechanisms of the realization of corporality in modern Serbian and Montenegrin prose as a part of global socio-cultural changes and changes in worldview. Drawing parallels between Raoul Eshelman's concept of performatism and the transition from rationalization to “immersion” in the world described by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in “Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey” the author views the fusion of corporeal and mental elements in the texts of the writers under analysis as a movement towards a “culture of presence,” and a consequence of ideological shifts that began in the 60's with calls “against interpretation.” The latter determines the novelty of the work. During the research the author uses analysis and synthesis; the comparative method for establishing similarities and differences between corporeality manifestations in the texts under analysis; the inductive method, which allowed movement from the study of individual phenomena in selected works to theoretical generalizations; the hermeneutic method for the interpretation of the phenomenon of the corporeal in literary texts under analysis; and the cultural-historical method, which enabled consideration and interpretation of the phenomena of the corporeal as part of global processes, in the context of the cultural history of the end of the 20^th and beginning of the 21^st centuries.