CERC Public Seminar: 'Ghost Wars: Serbian narrative fictions of the NATO bombardment'

Tuesday 11 April 1:00-2:00pm
at Room 212, Level 2, 234 Queensberry Street, The University of Melbourne

presented by

Dr David Norris

(Serbian and Croatian Studies, University of Nottingham )

Abstract

David Norris's work for the last few years has focused on themes in Serbian film and novels from the death of Tito to NATO's attack on Serbia and Montenegro . It has been a time of great political change, a period of almost constant historic crisis, leading to war and the end of a country. This trauma has evoked a complete rethinking of personal and social identities, a process which spills outside the usual categories of history. It has been a disturbing and uncanny experience at a time when reality frequently resembled unreality. Fiction, with its scope of imaginative understanding, offers ways in which to frame that experience, a statement to give witness to the unfolding changes. The ghost motif recurs in Serbian literature and films of this period adding further depth and complexity to their semantic layers. In this paper, David Norris discusses functions of the ghost motif as found in the later phase relating to NATO's bombardment of 1999.

Biography

David Norris is Senior Lecturer in Serbian and Croatian Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. He teaches and researches on cultural questions of the twentieth century, particularly in relation to Serbian literature and film. He has taught on Nottingham's MA in Critical Theory and supervised PhD students in fields from both Serbian cultural history and narrative theory. His publications include In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: Questions of Identity and Modernity (1993), and he is co-author with Dr Vladislava Ribnikar of Teach Yourself Serbian (2003).