Prirodna katastrofa kao kulturna trauma: poetika i politika emocija u prikazima dubrovačkog potresa 1667. godine

Abstract

The great earthquake of 1667 is considered in modern historiography as one of the key events in the history of the Republic of Dubrovnik, which had multiple social, economic and political consequences. This natural disaster is the subject of several literary texts, written by authors, some of whom were themselves victims and/or witnesses of the tragedy. Four shorter occasional poems (by N. Bunić, P. Kanavelić, B. Bettera, M. Bunić) were created as an immediate reaction to the disaster, already in 1667, while the epyllion Feniče (Phoenix) by Nikolica Bunić and the historical epic Dubrovnik ponovljen (Dubrovnik Restored) by Jaketa Palmotić as well as two poems in Latin were written after the biggest crisis had passed. Approaching these texts from the perspective of the theory of cultural trauma, the paper deals with the representation of emotions associated with the (post)traumatic social process of community renewal. The paper points out that emotional scenarios in the works of writers from Dubrovnik evoke typical representations of natural disasters in early modern Europe. The analysis considers specific emotional politics of trauma and the emotional strategies through which the observed texts functioned as a social medium for processing collective/cultural trauma.

Keywords

• the 1667 dubrovnik earthquake
• cultural trauma
• literary emotions
• petar kanavelić
• jaketa palmotić dionorić