Breathing Underwater: The Complicity of the Defaced in Post-Multinational Literature (Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature)

Breathing Underwater: The Complicity of the Defaced in Post-Multinational Literature offers an intervention in contemporary world literature studies by introducing the post-multinational condition as a dynamic and polyvalent platform for literature's worlding.Moving beyond conventional frameworks, it reorients how we read the works of Dubravka Ugrešic, Aleksandar Hemon, and Saša Stanišic and challenges prevailing assumptions in narrative and literary studies. The book presents Dubravka Ugrešic, Aleksandar Hemon, and Saša Stanišic as post-multinational writers who strive to disentangle themselves from the burdensome legacy of the dismembered Yugoslavia.After its dissolution, Ugrešic settled in the Netherlands but continued to write in her own language; Hemon settled in the United States and started to write in English, and Stanišic settled in Germany and took recourse in German.Being thrown into multiple non-belongings, they resorted to the depersonalized medium of writing so as to forg