LITERARY HISTORY/ HISTORICAL LITERATURE: THE USE OF CREATIVE NON-FICTION AS HISTORICAL ARTIFACT IN THE BREAKUP OF THE BALKANS

The present study seeks to argue for a literary approach to writing history. In particular, it will use the case of the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and a sample of authors who documented it to show that this approach can add value to our understanding of history beyond what journalistic and historical sources already give us. A literary approach to history gives us a personal account of historical events or—if not directly experienced by the author—a personal reaction, digestion and assimilation of the facts presented in other sources in order to give us a snapshot of the extant zeitgeist that cannot be gleaned from a straightforward presentation of those facts.
The approach advocated in this study is something of two methods of recording history: journalistic account and testimonial. It bridges disciplines, fusing an historical (or comparative political) understanding of the wars that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the international response to them and individual perspectives recorded through literary testimonials of those same events. This approach seeks to forge a new avenue of potential inquiry (or add to work already being done in the same vein by applying it to a new case) within the comparative study of history, political science, and literature.
The work of Norman Mailer in forging a type of “literary journalism” will be considered, as well as, and particularly, his writings on the bombings of Kosovo in 1999. Moreover, Italian author Erri De Luca’s collection of short stories, Pianoterra (2008), will be examined using my own translations of the pertinent texts dealing with his time as a humanitarian convoy driver in Bosnia during the war. Finally, the multimedia historical project embarked upon by musician PJ Harvey and photojournalist Seamus Murphy, documenting their travels and interactions with locals in Kosovo, will round out the study with the most abstract example of non-traditional, literary historicizing.