Serbian Literary Moderna ‘Caught’ in the Process of Communication

Beginning with today’s widely accepted thesis about literature as an act of communication, the paper presents a part of the results of a wider study of that process in a diachronic overview of recent Serbian literature. The base of the research is the question of the historicity of literature, including the problematization of the concept of development as the key determinant of a group of authors dealing with literary-historical processuality, and simultaneously rejecting the final consequence of the poststructuralist demand for the deconstruction of history. In so posited a frame, the study incorporates the communication between Serbian literary Moderna and a wider social and cultural context in which texts come into being, and which themselves constitute the mentioned context, and a dialogue with the present moment in which criteria of the value and meaning of literary texts shift. Through the examination of that period, it problematizes the question of the time frames of literary-historical stages, their internal dynamics, and their correlation with other literary periods/directions/movements. We rely on interdisciplinary studies that shed light on the literary process in contact with other arts for the argumentation of some literary attributes of Serbian Moderna, as well as for the explication of some of its under-researched characteristics. For that purpose, one segment of the paper is devoted to the relationship between the poetic texts of Moderna and visual arts (sculpture and painting) and music. The methodological foundation of the paper consists of the examination of literature from the perspective of phenomenological studies, which arrived at their reinterpretation with the development of cognitive studies, at the centre of which is literature as an act of communication.