
Učinci književnosti: performativna koncepcija pripovjednog teksta
The Effects of Literature: The Performative Conception of the Narrative Text by Kristina Peternai Andrić is a scholarly monograph that explores the concept of performative in literary theory, with a focus on the ethical-political effects of storytelling.
Starting from the theory of speech acts J.L. Austin, the author follows the development of performatives - statements that not only describe, but perform the action to which they refer, in contrast to constatives that describe reality and can be true or false. Austin's idea that language can have the power to act is extended to literature, where narrative texts not only depict but shape identities, power relations, and social dynamics.
The book analyzes how Austin's conception was criticized and developed by thinkers such as Benveniste, Strawson and Searle, culminating in the controversy between Searle and Derrida, who connects performativity with ethical and political questions of responsibility. Peternai Andrić investigates how literature, through a performative turn, can act as a medium of enslavement or resistance, but emphasizes that the ethical principle of responsibility prevents the complete domination of power. He especially relies on the concepts of metafiction and historiographical metafiction (L. Hutcheon) and Lévinas' philosophy of ethics. The subject and the narrative text remain in an undecidable position between power and resistance, making literature a space of risk and opportunity. This is a pioneering work in Croatian literary scholarship on performativity and its implications.
One copy is available