Scope and Focus

This project examines documentary literature in contemporary European writing since 1989 from a comparative literary perspective, with particular attention to post-Yugoslav and neighboring cultural spaces, including Italian and Hungarian literatures, the German-speaking area, as well as Czech, Polish, Russian, and Russophone contexts. Its primary aim is to identify, analyze, and systematize diverse genres of documentary writing, situating them within transnational literary constellations and shared historical horizons shaped by late socialism, post-socialist transformation, war, and shifting regimes of memory. The project’s specific research aims and analytical priorities are outlined in detail in the Research Aims and Scope section.

Theoretical Framework and Research Questions

Addressing key gaps in existing scholarship, the project examines selected literary texts through two central theoretical concepts: the mimetic contract and referentiality. These concepts frame a series of interrelated research questions concerning the epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical status of documentary writing. What narrative strategies enable literary texts to generate an effect of factuality while actively shaping and constructing the realities they claim to represent? How does the document function within literary works—as archival trace, bureaucratic residue, aesthetic object, challenge to canonical literary forms, or mode of political intervention? How do documentary texts sustain readerly engagement despite the explicit tension between imaginative construction and claims to historical truth?

Literature, Memory, and the Archive

A central focus of the project lies in the relationship between literature, memory, and the archive. Drawing on insights from memory studies and archival theory, the archive is approached not as a neutral repository of the past but as a historically contingent, institutionally mediated, and ideologically structured space. Within this framework, the document is understood both as a material trace of past events and as a literary and cultural construct whose meaning is reshaped through processes of selection, framing, and narrative recontextualization. The project explores how literary texts mobilize archival materials, rework historical sources, and intervene in dominant regimes of cultural memory.

Ethics, Representation, and Factuality

The research further asks to what extent documentary literature can claim a privileged relationship to historical accuracy and what such claims reveal about the ethics of fiction and the production of social knowledge. How do literary texts negotiate responsibility toward historical referents, witnesses, and communities of memory? In what ways does fiction participate in the construction of the very objects and events it appears merely to document?

Contribution to Literary and Cultural Studies

Proceeding from the premise that documentary aesthetics constitute a distinct and increasingly central domain within contemporary literary and cultural studies, the project situates its inquiry within ongoing debates identified by many scholars as foundational to present-day humanities research. It further argues that the document—understood as both an object of representation and an operative aesthetic device—forms the basis of some of the most productive currents in contemporary literature. This recognition calls for systematic comparative analysis and theoretically informed interpretation, pursued through collaborative research by scholars from academic institutions in Croatia and abroad.

By moving beyond the notion of objective truth in literary representation and critically reassessing the binary opposition between fact and fiction, the project conceptualizes factuality as a relational and discursive category. It examines how fictional and non-fictional modes of discourse intersect and co-constitute meaning in contemporary European literatures, contributing to broader discussions in comparative literature, memory studies, and archival theory on representation, mediation, and cultural memory.