Breathing Underwater

Vladimir Biti is Chair Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna and author of 11 books, including Tracing Global Democracy (De Gruyter, 2016), Attached to Dispossession (Brill, 2018), Post-imperial Literature (De Gruyter, 2022), and Perpetrators' Legacies (Routledge, 2024). He has edited multiple volumes on post-imperial Europe, comparative and world literature. Co-editor of Arcadia: Journal of Literary Culture and Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory, he chaired the Academy of Europe's Literary and Theatrical Section from 2016 to 2022.

• Introduction: The Limits of Literary Geopolitics: Belonging to Longing; Part One; Dubravka Ugrešić; Identification-at-a-Distance: Voicing the silenced inthe work of Dubravka Ugrešić; Crumbled Heritage: (De)Facing Pain in in Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and The Ministry of Pain; Un/worlding Literature: Dubravka Ugrešić as a Post-Multinational Writer; Part Two; Aleksandar Hemon; Restoring a Free-Floating Togetherness: Hemon's Sheltering of the Homeless; (Re)creating Family: The Symbolic Capital of Hemon's Storytelling; Part Three; Saša Stanišić; Entangled Chimeras: Homeland and Hostland in Stanišić's and Prcić's Novels; Farewell to Time: The annulment of temporality in the work of Saša Stanišić; Coda: The Complicity of the Defaced; References; Index

"Breathing Underwater is a groundbreaking study on the questions of authorial identity, transnational and multinational literary selves, and literature which surpasses the conventional modes of classification. Vladimir Biti approaches these issues from many different perspectives – cultural, religious, political and social – and offers the reader many fresh, inspiring and theoretically grounded positions, thus subtly modifying the way we read literature and talk about it. This book is a must-read for those interested in transnational literature." ~ Zoran Milutinović, University College London