engleski

The Nonhuman World of Luka Bekavac's Fiction: The Narrative Out of Time

The main contention of this paper is that Luka Bekavac’s fiction in general and his treatment of time in particular can be construed as a literary response to a philosophical problem that speculative realism placed back at the forefront of contemporary continental philosophical discussions – the possibility of knowledge of the world in itself, or a world independent from and indifferent to human thought and knowledge. In order to explicate this claim the first part of the paper provides a brief overview of speculative realism in general and its relation to literature in particular, with special emphasis being placed on H. P. Lovecraft’s weird fiction and its relation to Bekavac’s literary endeavour. The second part of the paper then presents a reading of the temporality of Bekavac’s novels Drenje (2011), Viljevo (2013) and The Curfew: Premonitions, Recollections (2015) which shows that all of these novels deconstruct the classical notion of time on various different levels. Finally, the concluding part of the paper brings these two strands of the discussion together in order to show the manner in which Bekavac’s deconstruction of the classical notion of time is to be understood as a response to the challenge of constructing a literary work of art which would instantiate in the reader the experience of an encounter with a nonhuman object, a work of art utterly alien to human cognitive faculties.

Luka Bekavac, speculative realism, H. P. Lovecraft, weird fiction, time, narratology

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