History Awry: The Sarajevo Assassination Fallout According to Basara and Jergović

In Basara’s Anđeo atentata and Jergović’s Doboši noći the fiction of history is consistently being embrangled with the history of fiction, to the effect of constantly bringing up short all efforts to explain one in terms of the other. The literariness of the two novels being foregrounded precisely by its explicit denial, the issue of the interpretive bearing of narrative embedding on the factual content is inevitably raised. Relying on the theoretical insights of H. White, P. Ricoeur, R.N. Lebow and E. Runia, the paper argues that the demands thereby made on the reader work as a critique of the two principal means of making the disconcerting past conform: media sensationalism and exegetic misconstrual.