engleski

The Great War between History and Literature – Theoretical Controversies in Croatian Memoirs

The relations between language and reality, including the way the past is reflected both in history and in literature, were the subjects of many heated philosophical and theoretical debates during the 20th century, some of which continue to this day. One important line of dispute concerned the concept of language as a means of communication, and its ability or inability to record and convey past experiences, especially the traumatic ones. Another line of dispute concerned the nature of autobiographic texts. Are they to be approached using the tools of historic and legal sciences, as testimonies, or using the tools of modern literary theory, as texts? Are these approaches mutually exclusive, or is it possible to find a fruitful combination? Moreover, are social sciences and humanities, defined in a positivistic manner, capable of explaining – or at least presenting – the human position at all, or this is the task to be endeavoured only by art? On the other hand, has modern art, including literature, not become too artificial, too abstract, too detached from the world to be able to explain or even present it? Perhaps it also has something to do with our society simultaneously becoming too complex to be understood in a realistic manner? Although the majority of them did not have any significant educational background, these kinds of questions were – in various ways – also posed by the authors of Croatian Great War memoirs, especially those active during 1930s, which could be termed the Golden Age of Croatian Great War Literature. Distant enough from the 1914–1918 conflict, yet weary of the forthcoming one, they offered some answers which are still relevant to the discussions of today.

autobiography; First World War; memory; literary theory; historiography

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