The Obverse and Reverse Side of Jasmine Musabegović’s Essayistic Discourse

Abstract

The paper analyses the essayistic discourse of Jasmina Musabegović with a focus on her second and last book of such procédé, Naličje historije (The Reverse Side of History) (1999), without neglecting her early essayistic work compiled in her first book of essays, The Secret and the Meaning of a Literary Work (1977). Since the literary criticism and essayistic work of this author, on the one hand, and her literary and artistic work, on the other, are closely related and interwoven with seemingly contradictory but identical ideologemes, for a more complete insight, her micro-essays that make up fabric of her novels are occasionally taken into consideration in the analysis. The conclusion reached shows that the author’s later literary critique essays, i.e. those that the author wrote during and after the recent war, where the intimate intertwines with the universal and meets a multitude of opposing pairs as well as occasional paroxysms conditioned by a change in life experience, represent a specific, fluid essayistic discourse that can be characterized by the newly coined phrase “women’s essay”.

Keywords

• essay
• poetics of witnessing
• engaged literature
• culture of memory
• intermediality