(Continuation of the previous part)
Names as strong points of text
Naming and renaming procedures are represented in stylistic literature as a special type of stylistic device, figure (see, for example, Kovacevic 2000). However, the names of literary characters and naming practices in general also belong to the category of strong text positions (see Katnić-Bakaršić 1999: 99). In the novels Slavica Perović they are both. We will give some examples.
Agneza Ena remembers her childhood, in which she had a “grandmother” and a “great-grandmother”. Great-grandmother chose a name for her, the semantic and symbolic value of which the grandmother does not understand. Short, elided sentences, exclamation and interrogativeness bring liveliness and emotional expression to the dialogue, with a short unpretentious intertextual reference at the end of the conversation:
- Child, come here! I have something for you.
- My name is not Child. I am Agneza Ena.
- Oh, yes! What is your name, God willing?
- Lamb, grandma.
- How is the lamb, poor thing?
- That's right, Grandma. Grandma told me that name protects me, that I'm the lamb of God.
- What an Agnes, what an Ena! You are my Milena! Come here, Milena, so I can kiss that smart head! But here's a book about that prince. Little, you say? (Perović 2012: 159)
After ending an email to a London acquaintance inviting her to participate in a competition with “BW, Agnes.” - Agneza Ena thinks about her name in her signature. The procedure of successive repetition of the perfect tense of the verb to be at the beginning of rhythmic units - cumulated, coordinated clauses (anaphora) emphasizes the preteritality and intensifies the emotionality of the expression. The cumulation of names and nicknames in variations reminds her of the complexity and questionability of her own identity:
“Agnes. It was Agneza Ena, it was Ena, it was Anjeza, it was Milena, why not Agneza? She didn't know what her identity was anyway. She added a smiley, and in doing so, she admitted to Andrew Berry that she owed him something. She didn't know exactly what.” (Perović 2012: 314)
Concrete blues is a text that abounds in naming practices, highly emotionally marked and semantically interesting. […] New Daughter-in-Law duplicates the strong position of the title by choosing the name of the main character and also introduces imaginative naming procedures in an aesthetic function. The interesting fact that the text mentions the “surgeon” Lajkoff (a discreetly present strong position of the text), to whom certain (pseudo)quotes are attributed, establishes an intertextual connection with the scientific works of Prof. Dr. Slavica Perović, whose mentor at Berkeley was a distinguished linguist, Professor Robin Lakoff (see also the interview for Art from November 7, 2009, 6-7, entitled Language is a diagnostic tool, which the author of this paper made with Prof. Dr. Slavica Perović on the occasion of a linguistic study Language in action, published the same year). The combination of fact and fiction in the style of postmodernist poetics is strikingly present here. In the context of this specific intertextuality, i.e. transsemiotic reference to texts by the same author (in this case the author), we will once again look at the phenomenon of the namelessness of a woman, a kind of minus-presence of a sign whose semantics are unquestionable - and which was the subject of the scientific work of Professor Perović. In a literary text, for example, it is strikingly present in the novel Concrete blues, especially through the comparison of contemporary and feudal, medieval social reality, in which the motif of “Mlada Gojkovica” and its namelessness is repeated and considered in different registers, with an ironic distance in relation to the semantics of the “golden apple”, the emotions and tears shed over the innocent victim of “lack of knowledge in statics” who needs to be “compensated” - and probably also “malnutrition of workers” and bad weather conditions, and other unfavorable circumstances that are most easily attributed to the whims of a fairy, a supernatural being (female), and the suggestiveness of this idea will already be ensured by the folk guslar as an ideal ‘PR’ - thus rounding off irony as a semantic figure in the narrative. [...]
Internet, intertextuality and emotion
A special source of emotional-expressive stylistic devices, intertextuality and citation is the space of the Internet, present in all the works that this paper deals with, and most of all in the novel Concrete blues.
The interaction of the Internet and feelings is stylistically marked and semantically interesting. The presence of the epistolary online form in the structure and composition of the text is only one way to emphasize the emotionality of expression in private communication between characters, but certainly one of the more effective.
The Idea of Culture as Text (Geertz), according to which each individual text is just another added meaning in the ocean of a universal, unique Text, is expanding in media and encompassing the online space.
“As in more familiar exercises in close reading, one can start anywhere in a culture's repertoire of forms and end up anywhere else.” (Geertz 1973: 453) (“As in more familiar exercises in close reading, one can start anywhere in a culture's repertoire of forms and end up anywhere else.” - this author noted more than half a century ago.)
Just like in the quoted sentence, although written decades before the Internet as an invention of our time began to affect people's lives - in the novel Life lift an online universe is revealed in which “one can start anywhere” and “end anywhere else.” Hence the abundance of connections, intertextual and intermedial references, from the lowest to the highest aesthetic standards and registers in various arts and non-artistic contents - yet it is not conspicuously eclectic, but perfectly convincing.
This "broad co-authorship" evokes ideas and creations that precede it or appear simultaneously, and anticipates those that are yet to come, announces and inspires the new, reaches into the past and reaches into the future - and represents a typical postmodernist manner, multifaceted and aesthetically interesting in many ways. (Serbedzija's Until the last breath is a significantly different story than Godarov, another genre, another medium and another art - and in another genre, that is, art, using the same title is a legitimate procedure for which there are quite a few examples - but the title itself, as the strongest position of the text, opens a dialogue that is in itself an alienation and a source of meaning.)
From the formal tone of AFS and NFS, which bring distance and suppress sensitivity, to the informal RFS, which expresses emotions more easily and directly, and which often connotes the ludic function of language - all FS are represented, and all are subject to the aesthetic function that is the supreme principle of literary and artistic style (KFS). Re-registration enriches the text and introduces new meanings. This artistic procedure is recognizable in all of Perović's novels.
Intertextuality and intermediality themselves contain an emotional stylistic value. In other words, citationality, associations and allusions in quotations of all kinds, real and vacant, characteristic of literary and artistic style, as a narrative figure, most often function as a kind of emotem with stylistic potential, as an emotional-expressive means whose stylogenicity is realized in context.
In literature as an art, form is inseparable from essence, therefore the stylistic procedure with the value of emoteme is inseparable from the emotion it expresses and artistically shapes.
(Excerpts from a paper presented at the Third Stylistic Colloquium, held on April 4 and 5, 2025 in Zadar, entitled "Emotion in Slavic Stylistics and Poetics", organized by the International Slavic Committee and the University of Zadar)
Bonus video:
