Knjiženstvo, journal for studies in literature, gender and culture
Knjiženstvo, Journal for Studies in Literature, Gender and Culture is a free-access double-blind peer-reviewed electronic journal whose aim is to affirm interdisciplinary studies of women’s presence and work in literature, art and culture, as well as the field of digital humanities. The journal encourages cooperation in the study of gender in all languages, across various cultures and time periods. The editorial staff of the journal is particularly interested in innovative contributions of potential authors and is committed to the advancing of academic standards and the fight against every form of discrimination. Knjiženstvo is a scientific journal (category M24) included in the databases Scopus, EBSCO, ERIH PLUS and CEEOL. http://doi.fil.bg.ac.rs/unit. php?l=en&pt=journals&title= knjiz
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philology and University of Niš, Faculty of Philosophy
Authors retain the copyright to their works and grant the journal the right of first publication. The works are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
The first Bosnian Muslim woman author Nafija Sarajlić, and the rediscovery of her writing in relation to the canon
The aim of this paper is to analyse the stories by Nafija Sarajlić (1893–1970) in the relation to Bosnian Muslim literary canon, double standards towards women, restrictions, negation, trivialization and inferiority of the female experience. The phenomena described therein are the anxieties of authorship, the literary authority and influence, often overshadowed by the author’s autobiographical relationship with her husband Šemsudin Sarajlić (1887–1960). The focus of the analysis is her decision to stop writing due to family and social reasons. Therefore, from the example of Nafija Sarajlić, the ideal model of the woman-victim, or the Angel in the House, was built into the Muslim [Bosniak] literary canon. This paper will expose the distorted canonical image and feminist neglect of the first noted strategies of resistance to social dominance, as well as provide an explication of the complex position of the woman writer in the public sphere. With this interpretation, keeping in mind the literary injustice done to this author, I represent a cultural reinterpretation of Nafija Sarajlić. This paper offers a gynocritical reading of the works of the first Bosnian Muslim woman prose writer, Nafija Sarajlić, in the context of the historical Muslim Women’s Question and canon. This approach involves the reconstruction of the historical context of Bosnia under the Austro-Hungarians, as well as the particularities of Islamic tradition and culture, thereby highlighting the abandonment of writing.
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Poetry and the Burden of Creation: Rethinking the Walled Up Woman Folk Topos Through Gendered Lenses
The objective of this paper is to present a reinterpretation of the topos of the walled-up woman in contemporary poetry based on two poems: “Gojkovica” [“Гојковица”] by Desanka Maksimović (1898–1993) and “Despair” [“Очај”] by Vitomir Vito Nikolić (1934–1994). Both poems are analyzed in reference to the epic song “The Building of Skadar”. The interpretation of a folk text in relation to gender relations, as proposed by Alan Dundes in his monograph The Walled-Up Wife (Dundes, 1996), serves as a critical reference point for introducing both male and female perspectives in the analysis of those poetic works. This paper argues that key interventions in relation to the primary source include the centering of the lyrical subject – emphasizing individual emotions and existential struggles – and the prioritization of the Gojkovica figure, accompanied by the marginalization of other characters. It concludes that this folk motif, though often regarded as marginal or peripheral, remains a fertile means of expressing the dilemmas of contemporary human experience, particularly those of the poet-creator. Furthermore, it continues to play a vital role in shaping local cultural identities.
Ljubinka Škodrić. Žene Golog otoka. (Kažnjenice zbog Informbiroa u Jugoslaviji). Beograd : Vukotić media, 2025. 367 pp. ISBN 978-86-81510-96-4 The monograph Women of Goli otok by Ljubinka Škodrić, a senior research associate at the Institute for Contemporary History in Belgrade, and a specialist in women’s history during the World War II, is an exploration of women’s experiences in Yugoslavia’s conflict with the Informburo, an organization founded by the Soviet Union in 1947. Also known as the Tito–Stalin conflict, it was the resistance of a smaller and weaker state to a larger and stronger one, and also the resistance of an individual to the pressures from the authorities and the collective. Goli otok, the Yugoslav gulag, is synonymous with the anti-Stalinist struggle using Stalinist methods. Accused of sympathizing with the Informburo, over 1,000 women served their sentences in various prisons and camps between 1948 and 1956. The author’s task was to provide an integral view of women’s experiences during that period, as well as the consequences and traces of the conflict that were not erased even until the end of the existence of the Yugoslav state.
Biography in the Context of the Challenges of the Short Twentieth Century
Aleksandar Nikezić. Dobrila Glavinić Knezmilojković. Aleksinac: Centar za kulturu i umetnost „Aleksinac“, 2025. 195 pp. ISBN - 978-86-82648-24-6. Dobrila Glavinić Knezmilojković was born in 1900 and died in 1987, which means that she experienced all the challenges of the turbulent, as Eric Hobsbawm calls it, short 20th century and the age of extremes. She survived the First and Second World Wars, lived in two kingdoms and one socialist state. She witnessed numerous historical events, the consequences of which she felt on her own skin since the beginning of the First World War. The curator of the Local History Museum in Aleksinac, Aleksandar Nikezić, took on the task of researching this rich legacy and her biography, and presented the results of the research in a richly illustrated and documented monographic publication. Based on the biography of Dobrila Glavinić Knezmilojković, one can see several aspects of social development and cultural and political trends of the 20th century. She points to the progressive role of a thin layer of citizens who were aware of the need for modernization and enlightenment. She belonged to a small and significant group of female students who were sent to study abroad and brought new views, ideas, lifestyles and ways of governing.
Svetlana Tomin. Knjigoljubive žene srpskog srednjeg veka (second, revised and expanded edition). Novi Sad: Akademska knjiga, 2025. 206 pp. ISBN- 978-86-6263-597-6 The second edition of Book-Loving Women of the Serbian Middle Ages by Svetlana Tomin offers a comprehensive account of both prominent and lesser-known medieval women, now expanded with new insights and recent findings from Serbian and international medieval studies, as well as updated with relevant literature published in the meantime. Challenging the prevailing assumption that women in the Middle Ages occupied a marginal position in society, Tomin’s study reveals their active engagement in cultural and intellectual life: not only did they read and write books, but they also commissioned, purchased, and donated them.
Dimitrijević, Jelena. Na okeanu i preko okeana. Edited by Vladimir Đurić and Biljana Dojčinović. Niš: Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš; Belgrade: National Library of Serbia, 2024. ISBN: 978-86-7035-529-3. 163 pp. The poetry collection Na okeanu i preko okeana (On the Ocean and Across the Ocean) by Jelena J. Dimitrijević, written during her journey and stay in the United States in 1919-1920, was published in its entirety for the first time in 2024. These eighteen poems combine the motif of the Ocean as a symbol of eternity, hope and promise, as well as a space for both connection and separation between two worlds – the Old and the New – with depictions of American society and history and images of modern capitalism. The collection oscillates between introspective and travelogue tones, while its central theme remains the feeling of loneliness and non-belonging, which, despite the attempt to “sail into the harbor of oblivion”, cannot be overcome. The publication of the book aligns with the ongoing and growing scholarly interest in the work of Jelena Dimitrijević, further enriching and making her diverse opus more visible, while also making the reading of her travelogue Novi svet, ili U Americi godinu dana (The New World, or A Year in America) more engaging and complete.
Copyright (c) 2025 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Existential and Poetic Meaning of Women in the Short Stories of Robert Musil
This paper explores the role of female characters as mediators of individual and existential development of male protagonists in Robert Musil’s short stories. The analysis of “Grigia” and “The Portuguese Lady” demonstrates how female characters – even when they remain unacknowledged and unrecognized – function as key factors in revealing the meaning and significance within the male existence: it is through them that the protagonists are driven towards inner growth, while they also serve as a medium for the transcendental. In the two stories which we are focusing on (“Grigia” and “The Portuguese Lady”), the fate of Musil’s male protagonists portrays woman as idealized or objectified: the ideal other or a sexual object. Grigia is Homo’s intermediary to death, but also his lover in a time when she comes into contact with the archetype of the shadow, while the Portuguese Lady plays a crucial role in the process of von Ketten’s individuation, where the decisive role belongs to the development and integration of his feminine side. By interpreting “The Portuguese Lady” as an allegory of psychological development, in which archetypes such as the anima, animus, and shadow play a crucial role, we interpret the fantastical motif in the same key: the anthropomorphized and deified cat is understood as a miraculous influx of the feminine principle, initiating profound changes in all characters and resolving the love triangle. Drawing on C.G. Jung’s analytical psychology, Musil’s poetics, and the possibility of allegorical interpretation, this paper sheds light on the existential and poetic role of women: it becomes clear that there is a significant difference between the actual place of women in protagonists’ lives as opposed to those the protagonist believed they should occupy. Musil weaves archetypal content into these short stories, which is a key aspect of their mysterious nature, along with the critical role that Grigia and the Portuguese Lady assume in the protagonists’ lives.
Memory and time in Assia Djebar’s novel Les Alouettes naïves
The article analyzes themes of collective memory and time in Assia Djebar’s early novel Les Alouettes naïves basing its approach firstly on Halbwachs’s sociology of memory, and, in the case of the protagonist Rachid’s memory, on Freudian thought of trauma. Halbwachs, contrary to Bergson, sees the individual conscience and the individual memory not as being limited to a person, and thus closed in itself, but as a meeting point of different collective memories, where the latter concept is defined as a memory of a particular social group. The article author first analyzes the memory of Omar, Nfissa and Rachid, the three protagonists of the novel, commencing his analysis with the study of the memory of Omar, the autodiegetic narrator. Omar’s individual memory is seen as the intersection of family memory, of collective memory he shares with Rachid, his closest friend, and of partisans for independence memory, all those collective memories being interior and interiorized. Moreover, the first two memories are closely interwoven, as Rachid is Omar’s relative. According to Halbwachs, the very existence of a recollection proves that all relationships with a particular social group have not been broken. Thus, although Omar had to break his long-term friendship with Rachid after having expressed his love to Rachid’s wife Nfissa, Omar’s recollections of Rachid, his telling us the story of their childhood and youth memories, recreate the bond between them. Thus, Omar who remembers, is not alone, but in a sense still makes part of the small group of two intimate friends he constituted with Rachid. The most important collective memory concerning Nfissa’s character is the family one in which her recalling her young mother’s taking her and her sister to a ritual weekly bath in a Turkish hammam in their childhood has a privileged place. The family memory is interwoven with the memory of “women of patio”, as the author article names the group including Nfissa’s close and distant relatives, but also her mother and her two elder sisters, who were confined to their home since the age of eight. As in the above-mentioned case of Omar, Nfissa recollections, her memories, such as, for example, the memories of dances at women’s gathering at wedding parties, prove that in spite of her being a university student, and an emancipated young woman to a certain degree, she stills has not broken all her bonds with those “women of interior”. That implies that Nfissa, Djebar’s double, has not broken her bonds with her ethnic, national and religious origin and background that still remain an important part of her identity. In the case of Rachid, “divided man”, the external focalization denies the reader the access to this character’s thoughts. As a reader can only make hypothesis based on Rachid’s behavior, gestures and what this taciturn character chooses to say, it is only in the last chapters that it is revealed that Rachid memory is a repressed one, as consequence of his family and war traumas, where the first “trigger”, the first traumatic event was his young sister Zhor’s death during his adolescence. The inhibition failure is the source of Rachid’s great suffering and his nightmares. The unconsciousness being atemporal, Rachid’s traumatic past is not past nor dead at all, and it cannot fade away, diminish its force, nor be forgotten, but is always latent and thus tormenting him. Each collective memory having its own particular time, the last subchapter of the article studies the correlations of those times, which create in some cases the “time cluster” (Namer 1997), as times of different collective memories are separate one from another.
Houses in Memory of Nadežda Petrović, Part II: Traces of Memory and Archival Sources — The Petrović House at Ratarska 32
This work examines the complex relationship between individual memory, collective memory, and the documentary materials that emerge from them. By analyzing two seemingly divergent approaches to interpreting personal remembrance and cultural collective memory, the study grounds itself in Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory. According to Assmann, the individual is always the subject of memory and remembrance, yet personal memory is shaped by the social frameworks that organize the individual. This perspective aligns with contemporary cultural theories that recognize the role of family heritage in shaping cultural identity. Within this conceptual framework—which places family memory on equal footing with collective memory—the paper explores the historical continuity of the Petrović family, with particular attention to Ljubica Luković, one of the daughters of Dimitrije and Mileva Petrović. The family’s presence at Ratarska 32 is reconstructed through the long-term recollections shared in direct conversations between the author and Mr. Miloš Kolaž. A second, documentary mode of remembering is developed through the analysis of archival records that identify the house at Ratarska 32 as a site of memory. These documents provide deeper insight into the social era in which the Petrović family lived, formed individual identities, shaped their family identity, and contributed significantly to the development of cultural collective memory.The aim of this work is to understand how individual memory, collective cultural memory, and documentary memory intersect to form a foundation for researching cultural heritage. The study is supplemented with archival materials related to the Petrović family home at the former Ratarska 32, the scholarly work of historian Dimitrije Mita Petrović, and family correspondence. These materials support the argument that documentary analysis contributes to establishing an objective framework for understanding personalities and events that are otherwise viewed from a considerable temporal distance.
Masculinity in the Novel To Kill a Mockingbird
The purpose of this paper is to delve into the questions of masculinity and what it is that constitutes a real man. The paper will contrast hegemonic masculinity as constructed by societal norms and which is exemplified in various representatives across the novel with the archetype of the noble man who the author embodies in the character of Atticus Finch. It will further be shown that the author’s noble man is not only superior to the typical macho man even by the standards set by hegemonic masculinity, rather that he also is far more versatile and complete as a person – in other words, the noble man is the ideal man. The noble man can do anything the macho man does, and he can do it better. Atticus demonstrates this when it is revealed that he is the finest marksman in the Maycomb County. Arthur Radley defeats Bob Ewell in single combat at the end of the novel, saving the lives of Jem and Scout in the process. Hegemonic masculinity teaches us that a real man is a warrior. Harper Lee’s ideal men are also warriors for they best the representatives of hegemonic masculinity in every encounter. Her ideal man is also an intellectual. Atticus is educated and knowledgeable, an expert in the field of law, and he defends Tom Robinson in court eloquently and factually. The ideal man that Harper Lee advocates is a man of superior physical skills and superior intellect. But even more than that, he is also an inspiration for his kindness, gentleness, compassion, and virtue. The final thing that the paper will demonstrate is that such a man is not too unrealistic to exist. He does feel fear and pain, but he chooses the path of courage and virtue regardless of the fear. Even more than that, through the analysis of selected scenes from the viewpoint of masculinity studies, the paper demonstrates that the figure of the moral hero Atticus Finch is not only a fictional character, but rather a cultural model that challenges societal patterns. For Atticus, the values that he defends are something real, they carry weight and are deeply rooted in his identity, whereas for the opposing side they represent imposed behavioral norms that no one really believes in but everyone uses because they continue to function.
Writing about the Loss of a Child: From Emotion to Action in the Work of Camille Laurens
Since its publication in 1995, the short novel Philippe by Camille Laurens has represented a unique work in the history of contemporary French literature, as it brings to the forefront for the very first time the death of a baby, a taboo subject that had been almost entirely silenced both socially and literarily. By narrating her own tragic experience, Laurens seeks at once to clarify for herself the circumstances that led to the child’s death, to draw attention to negligence and irresponsibility in maternity wards of the 1990s, and to offer a possibility of comfort, solidarity, and recognition to all readers who have faced a similar loss. In this way, personal testimony becomes not only a literary act of resistance but also a space of collective identification. Philippe also marks a turning point in Laurens’s creative trajectory: after her first novels dominated by fiction, she turns to autofiction, a genre that would characterize her later work. In our paper we show how this taboo motif further develops in her oeuvre: in Dans ces bras-là (2000) it appears as a persistent shadow in the background of love stories, in Cet absent-là (2004) it becomes a theme tied to the question of memory, while in Fille (2020) it takes on a new form: the experience of loss is fictionalized, embedded within a broader narrative of female lineage, and transformed into an archetypal figure of absence. Through the analysis of these texts, we demonstrate that Laurens shapes a specific writing of absence, in which personal loss becomes a universal experience – both individual and collective, intimate and archetypal, her prose unites emotion and action, converting autobiographical testimony into a shared cultural memory. Words become a means of shaping, recording, and transmitting trauma, but also of extracting ethical meaning from it. In this way, Laurens’s work confirms not only the cathartic and therapeutic function of literature but also its ethical power, its ability to transform pain into meaning, to inscribe trauma into language, and to turn it into collective memory and an act of resistance against oblivion.
East, West: Hybrid Identities of Women on the Margins of Modernity
This paper compares the novel Nove by Jelena J. Dimitrijević and the short stories “Separation” and “After Separation” by Feng Yuanjun, focusing on their protagonists, Fatma and Naihua. The introduction provides an overview of the authors’ lives and work, highlighting their efforts to give voice to women during periods of intense social transformation and the formation of national identities – an endeavor that inevitably exposed them to criticism. Dimitrijević portrays a Turkish woman on the eve of the Young Turk Revolution, while Feng Yuanjun depicts a Chinese woman in post-dynastic China. After a brief presentation of the works, the paper identifies the central similarities relevant to the analysis. Both protagonists come into contact with Europe, a contact mediated either through formal education or the presence of European teachers. At the same time, both characters are confined – Fatma institutionally (in the harem), and Naihua temporarily, through physical restriction as a form of punishment. Yet, both confinements stem from the same underlying structure: patriarchal control over women’s bodies and choices. Consequently, both heroines yearn for Europe and perceive it as a refuge of freedom, primarily understood as the freedom to choose their own partners. This desire represents their most significant form of resistance to the patriarchal communities in which they live. These complex stories lead to an inner division within the heroines, who realize that two opposing sides, two identities, are struggling within them. For this reason, the analysis is grounded in Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybrid identities and Biljana Dojčinović’s concept of deep transgression. The notion of hybridity is employed to shed light on the process of identity construction in characters torn between traditional and modern cultural models. At the same time, in order to show that hybrid positions are not necessarily empowering (on the contrary), the study relies on the concept of deep transgression, which underscores the impossibility of integrating such identities into society. Additionally, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality is employed as an analytical tool to highlight the protagonists’ multiple forms of oppression. Their oppression does not stem solely from gender, but from the intersections of gender, cultural, and geopolitical positioning. As a confirmation of this pattern, the paper also incorporated an analysis of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis. Examining the lives of the protagonists demonstrates that their hybrid identities produce an irreconcilable inner split, which, in such societies, inevitably leads to tragedy. The study concludes that neither Fatma nor Naihua belongs to any established category; they cannot be accommodated within East or West, tradition or modernity, but remain “outsiders“ in every social context. In their attempts to fit in, they undergo ethical, political, and identity negotiations, but these prove futile, as the solution lies not in the transformation of the individual, but in the transformation of society as a whole. Their longing for freedom and for Europe is revealed as a utopian project that generates irresolvable conflicts. Thus, while hybrid identity carries within itself a subversive potential – as shown through the cases of these protagonists – it ultimately fails to find grounding in societies undergoing early and unstable processes of modernization.
Interdisciplinary International Summer School Crossing Media Boundaries: Gender and Writing Across Artistic Media
Conducted by email between January 1 and June 6, 2025
The Poet, Time and Memoryin the Verses of Lidija Dimkovska
Lidija Dimkovska (1971), with her distinctive artistic expression, represents an highly acknowledged name in the critical context of contemporary Macedonian poetry and prose. This article aims to focus its interpretative attention to semantic reflection on some of the most important motifs that are performed in her poetry book Boundary Situation (2021). One of the key thematic categories in Dimkovska’s verses is memory, conceived as a spiritual simulacrum of Home. Hence, memory becomes the intersection point of the temporal and spatial actualization of existence. The interpretative point of view, evoking speculative complexes from the philosophical and existentialist categorical repertoire, commences from the premise of the border as a metaphor for the forms of the existential dichotomy and ambivalence of human being. Correspondingly, the motif of the border will be considered from the perspective of an inherent ontological state and predetermination of the human being understood within the causal interdependence between time and space and the psychological and existential connection between history and memory. Through this interpretative transcendence into the semantic universes of the poems of Lidija Dimkovska, will be shed light on a multitude of thematic depths, such as the issues of Home and the restorative and sentimental power of subjective memory. Furthermore, the article will confirm the discursive modus in which Dimkovska performs the actualization of her lyrical subject, through whose voice the poet reflects on the questions of the fragility of the human being in the collision between the past and the present, the aspects of dehumanization, the state of spiritual and material statelessness, the state of the double belonging in temporal and spatial constellations of consciousness, and also the phenomenon of the human being in the maelstrom of history. Consequently, the interpretation suggests the thesis of Lidija Dymkovska’s poems as a deep artistic actualization of the idea of the human as a being predetermined by time and space, but also of the idea of the human being as the Home of Memory and Memory as the Home of Being. For this reason, through her verses, Dimkovska, as a poet who decides on diverse thematic levels to articulate the polysemic existentialist metaphor of the boundary situation, proclaims and affirms the idea that the essential determination of the raison d`être of the poet’s being as a being of memory and time is precisely his attempt to prudently actualize the existential challenges of the spirit, as the only presupposition for recreating the aesthetic and ethical being of the world through the gnoseological recognition of the sublime ideals of human existence.
We Were Constantly in Some Kind of Protest
Reassessing Florika Stefan’s Literary Legacy
Florica Ștefan (1930–2016) is one of the rare authors of Romanian nationality to have secured a place within the canon of Serbian literature. Alongside Stevan Raičković, Branko Radičević, Mira Alečković, Miroslav Antić, and others, she stands out as one of the key representatives of subjective lyricism. Her work was not marginalized by literary history; on the contrary, she is cited in all major histories of Romanian literature in Vojvodina, as well as in numerous monographs and anthologies dedicated to Serbian poetry. Nevertheless, her oeuvre has long been interpreted through the predominantly masculine critical frameworks characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century, which led to her being categorized primarily as a lyrical poetess. As a result, a significant portion of her literary and extra-literary engagement has remained overshadowed by the pronounced sentimentalism associated with postwar poetry. The analysis of Florica Ștefan’s life and work is further complicated by her simultaneous affiliation with Serbian, Yugoslav, and Romanian literary spheres. It is therefore essential to examine critical discourse in both Serbian and Romanian in order to determine her canonical status more precisely. This paper offers, on the one hand, an overview of existing critical interpretations of Ștefan’s work, the literary canon, and its influence on the educational system and broader cultural context; on the other hand, it provides a new, comprehensive feminist analysis. The study’s underlying premise rests on the gynocritical hypothesis that women’s authorship must be revisited in order to identify themes, motifs, and strategies suppressed within the established critical paradigm, with the aim of challenging and destigmatizing the category of women’s lyric poetry. Florica Ștefan’s poetry is indeed partly shaped by feelings of love, nostalgia, and at times suffering, but it also constitutes an ethical and social expression. Through the prism of the personal, the poet speaks of the collective — of women’s destinies, the patriarchal rural world, corporeality, identity, history, and the culture of not one but two peoples. Beneath the lyrical beauty of her love poems lies an entire world saturated with pain, injustice, generational trauma, and powerlessness. Reflecting the realities she portrays, her poetic depictions of patriarchal society are stark, stripped of lyrical embellishment or euphemism. In this way, Florica Ștefan transforms the literary text into a form of social critique, seeking justice through her verses for all the unfulfilled destinies of women. For her, literature has not only aesthetic but also moral value — and it is precisely this dimension of her work that deserves to be brought to light.
Interdisciplinary International Summer School Sexual Desire Unbound: Literature, Landscapes, аnd Digital Dialogues
Lectures by Guest Professor Dr. Alenka Jensterle Doležal
Letters from Niš about Harems in the Albanian Language
The Memoirs of Jelica Belović-Bernadzikowska (Ljuba T. Daničić) are Published
Traces of Matriarchy in Serbian Literary Heritage