engleski

Reflecting Time, Narrating the Self: Aging in the Novel May Your Mother Give Birth to You by Vedrana Rudan

This paper aims at reading the novel "Dabogda te majka rodila" by Croatian writer Vedrana Rudan. The paper's primary goal is to analyse the novel's content-related and formal aspects, which determine gendered patterns of development of ageing and old age motives. The analysis employs M. Fludernick's concept of experientallity, where the author emphasises that the narrative situatedness „in an organic framework of embodied and evaluative experientiality" (Fludernik, 1996, 12). Following the embodied self as an agent of narration, the analysis shall proceed to the analytic framework of gender and body studies emphasising ageing as always gender- specific/determined. The leading analytic focus will be on the first-person narrator and its structural function as an intergenerational relay. Torn apart by her personal struggle(s), burdened by maintaining the highly complex "daughter- mother" relationship, the narrator serves as the reflection surface for the time-condensed patterns of the female coming of age. Each novelistic segment reveals the temporal dimension of growing/going through pain and time. Inter- generational anxiety (traumas, wounds, sorrow, pain) prevails throughout the narrative, and the mother's final diagnosis comes as a cognitive, emotional and symbolic shock, causing the dysfunctional relationship to end in, at the same time, post-mortem and future relief of the shared grave.

ageing, gender, mother-daughter relationship, Rudan

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