Speaker
Description
Nineteen Ninety-Two written by the Bosnian journalist Mirko Jeleč is a collection of 25 stories written in the documentary prose genre. The stories are told by witnesses and victims of events happening in Doboj, a small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina, when the war started in 1992. These personal accounts, first published in 2022 in the Bosnian edition, but translated into English and published in 2025, talk about the personal experiences and their effects on the people who told these stories. Interpretation of these personal accounts is based on New Historicism and Cultural Criticism literary theories to see how objective or subjective these truth-telling stories are. It will be analysed what was communicated and why, but also what was not communicated in these stories and why. The author claims that the purpose of publishing these accounts is to share the truth and not to instigate new conflicts or hatred. The personal accounts presented in Nineteen Ninety-Two will be compared to reporting of similar events by the media during the time of their occurrence in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war to investigate whether there have been any changes in the presentation and interpretation of such events thirty years later. This paper aims to connect these personal accounts to the continuous crisis of humankind in relation to the political agendas and ideological conflicts that are also recurring on large scales to ask the basic question - when is humankind going to learn from its mistakes. History does repeat itself and little is learnt from the past.
| Keywords | personal accounts, war, power of authority, continuous crisis of humankind |
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| vsuljic@ius.edu.ba |