Breathing Underwater The Complicity of the Defaced in Post-Multinational Literature

Introduction; The Limits of Literary Geopolitics: Belonging to Longing; Part One; Dubravka Ugrešić; Identification at a Distance: How to Voice the Silenced?; Crumbling Heritage: (De)Facing Pain in The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and The Ministry of Pain; Unworlding Literature: Dubravka Ugrešić as a Post-Multinational Writer; Part Two; Aleksandar Hemon; Restoring a Free-Floating Togetherness: Hemon's Sheltering of the Homeless; (Re)creating Family: The 'Symbolic Capital' of Hemon's Storytelling; Part Three; Saša Stanišić; Entangled Chimeras: Homeland and Hostland in Stanišić's and Prcić's Novels; Farewell to Time: Stanišić's Annulment of Temporality; Coda; The Complicity of the Defaced; References; Index

Biography

Vladimir Biti is Chair Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna and author of eleven books, including Tracing Global Democracy (De Gruyter, 2016), Attached to Dispossession (Brill, 2018), Post-imperial Literature (De Gruyter, 2022), and Perpetrators' Legacies (Routledge, 2024). He has edited multiple volumes on post-imperial Europe, comparative and world literature. Co-editor of Arcadia: Journal of Literary Culture and Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory, he chaired the Academy of Europe's Literary and Theatrical Section from 2016–2022. 

"Breathing Underwater is a groundbreaking study on the questions of authorial identity, transnational and multinational literary selves, and literature which surpasses the conventional modes of classification. Vladimir Biti approaches these issues from many different perspectives – cultural, religious, political and social – and offers the reader many fresh, inspiring and theoretically grounded positions, thus subtly modifying the way we read literature and talk about it. This book is a must-read for those interested in transnational literature." ~ Zoran Milutinović, University College London