Syndicate: EBR: EAST/EURO/POMO

[Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@v2.nl>]

Date: Thu, 03 Dec 1998 13:51:03 -0800
From: insomnia/vladislava gordic <insomnia@EUnet.yu>

	Electronic Book Review, the online literary forum
(http://www.altx.com/ebr/), has released its latest issue on EAST/EURO/POMO
("Postmodern Writing in Eastern and Central Europe"). This ebr special goes
online as ethnic conflicts intensify in Kosovo and pressure on Serbian
university and media continues. Still, guest editor Vladislava Gordic,
University professor from Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, along with the contributors
from Poland, Romania, Hungary, Western Europe, and the U.S., have little to
say about the spectacle of carnage produced by an atavistic and fragmenting
nation-state. Instead, one catches the spirit of another moment, the winter
of 1996/97 when a different kind of spectacle held sway in Belgrade,
through unprecedented, festive, and remarkably long-lived street
demonstrations that reached Western screens via contacts through the
Internet, bypassing the government's centralized control of local TV and
radio.

	In Eastern Europe  there has long been a fully developed
literature, a particular mix of genres and narrative arts that demonstrate
all the ambivalent and alienating features of Western postmodernism - such
as an adherence to formal experimentation, a narrative self-consciousness,
a way of "magicking the real," and a minimalist approach to story-telling.
Drawing influences from its massive cultural heritage and ongoing political
turbulence ("its territorial and ideological flame wars," in Gordic's
words), East European pomo suffers no shortage of gifted, remarkable
writers of an experimental cast, such as   Milorad Pavic, whose fantastical
and allegorical work (a print anticipation of hypertext) may turn out to be
no less insightful about the region's racial, ethnic, and religious
divisiveness than the more conventionally configured "Bosnian Chronicle" by
Nobel prizewinner Ivo Andric.

	This ebr special offers essays on Milorad Pavic's paratextual play,
Mikhail Bulgakov and Milos Crnjanski as the forerunners of postmodernism,
the portrait of the last world's peripatetic writer Miroslav Mandic, a
media parable on the new concept of the global dictatorship, Alice's
Adventures in Sanctionland, a survey of Romanian literature in  its clash
with postmodern sensibilities, a view on Polish poetry, and much more.
Check it at http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr8