The Concept of the Ideological Narrative Identity - Literary Context of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

Starting from the hypothesis that literature represents one of the active mechanisms of social and historical change and that the imagological images it offers have the potential to be written into cultural identity, the paper problematizes the (political-)ideological concept of narrative cultural identity. Having found an example in the contemporary literature of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the work points to the complexity of the relationship between literature and ideology in the process of re/defining, de/constructing, and maintaining cultural identity. The paper concludes that literature has the potential of generating and disseminating an (anti)ideologically based system of knowledge and values, whereby, in terms of its relationship to ideology, it occupies a dual position, becoming, on one hand, an ideal, Althusserian understood, ideological apparatus or a subversive mechanism of the dominant ideology, on the other side.

Keywords

• ideology
• cultural identification
• memory culture
• cultural identity