Assignments

Go to the Guide to The Bridge on the Drina

1. The book is named after the bridge, but Andrić never gives the bridge a personality or a consciousness, never commits the "pathetic fallacy". What, then, is the role of the bridge in his story? Is it a symbol, or what?

2. How does Andrić deal with folklore, myth, and legend? What does his attitude toward these seem to be?

3. It is reported that Andrić considered taking out the terrible story of the impalement, but in the end he left it in. Why do you think he did this?

4. What might be the meaning of the way the book ends?

5. Relations between the Muslim and Serb populations in Bosnia have been much in the news in the past decade. How would you characterize these relations as shown in Andrić's book? Does he seem to take sides?

6. Andrić's book is obviously fiction, a kind of story-telling, but not a novel as we usually use the word. Andrić himself called it a "chronicle", whatever that means. What kind of a book is it, and what does it seem to be trying to do?

7. Can you find in the book attitudes toward life, or forms of human behavior, that Andrić appears especially to admire?

Writing assignment for Friday, Sept. 13

Write a two- to three-page paper on either #6 or #7 of the study questions above.

Milovan Djilas (1911-95) and his brothers, raised in the remote and impoverished world you will read about, grew up to become educated men and members of the (illegal) Communist Party. Milovan himself was in the inner circle of the party leader, Josip Broz (Tito), from early in the Second World War. After the war he was one of the top strategists and administrators of Yugoslavia's Communist state until, about 1950, he began to put forward ideas that were at odds with the official party line. In 1954 he was stripped of his positions, and from 1956 on he was in and out of prison because of the works he wrote and published abroad, such as The New Class (1957). His four volumes of memoirs (this is the first) were mostly written in prison.

Land without Justice covers the first eighteen years of Djilas's life, until he departed Montenegro to go to university in Belgrade. We read the Editor's Introduction and Parts One and Two.

Study questions for Friday, October 4

1. The two most common motives for writing memoirs may well be to stamp one's name on the historical record, and to make money. Neither applies in the case of these memoirs. What do you think Djilas's purpose was in writing them? What do you think he meant his readers to get out of the book?

2. The code by which Montenegrin men like Djilas's father lived their often short and violent lives is illustrated repeatedly in the book, but not really stated. Can you state it?

3. Compare and contrast Djilas's and Andrić's views of life and the world as shown in the two books you have read.

4. There would seem to be a conflict between the love Djilas obviously bears for his homeland and the title of his book, Land without Justice. How does Djilas reconcile the two?

Write a two- to three-page paper on any one of the study questions above. Be sure to bolster your argument with illustrations from the book.

1. What do you think Rebecca West means when she uses terms like "honest" and "intense" to describe the way Yugoslavs lived? Does she see the Yugoslavs as "noble savages", primitives of some sort?

2. The historical passages are written in a mode that has since become utterly unfashionable. How would you evaluate what these passages aim to accomplish? What effect do they have?

3. Does West seem to take sides between Serbs and Croats?

4. Rebecca West writes: "I had come to Yugoslavia because I knew that the past has made the present, and I wanted to see how the process works" (54); and "I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood." (103) Can you see what she means? Do these passages from her book make a good case for the premises she expresses here? On her showing, is Yugoslavia a good place for her to seek her answers?

5. In form the book is a travelogue, an account of travels in an exotic place. Is it more than that? What in the end is it exactly?

Writing assignment for Friday, October 25

Write a two- to three-page paper on any of the last three study questions above, nos. 3, 4 and 5. You haven't read the whole book, but don't worry about that: you've read enough to answer any of these questions. Be sure to bolster your argument with illustrations.

Writing assignment for Monday, November 4

Write a two- to three-page paper on one of the following topics, giving examples from Todorova's book in support of your argument:

1. Give at least three ways in which Todorova's book illuminates and extends what you already knew about Balkan history from this course.

2. Make at least two critical objections to the book, pointing out ways in which Todorova seems to you to misrepresent her subject, to get into conceptual problems with her approach, or to fall short in some other fashion.

In this reading we implicitly leap ahead a number of years: Isabel Fonseca describes the Balkans of the early 1990s, of the post-Communist world, rather than those of the Communist years with which the lectures are still concerned. Some features of the broader environment may be unfamiliar to you for this reason, but don't let that distract you from other features you should readily recognize. Concentrate on the features you can understand.

Fonseca's interactions with the Gypsies took place not only in the Balkans – in all the Balkan countries except Greece – but in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany. Fee; free to skim material drawn from non-Balkan countries, but don't skip it entirely: it contains points of general interest.

1. Why do you think we see so many more Gypsies in this part of the world than in the West?

2. What do we learn about the Balkans from having our attention drawn to the Gypsies and their place in this world?

3. Why are the people among whom the Gypsies live often so antagonistic towards them? What can realistically be done to reduce this hostility – by the governments, by the surrounding communities, by the Gypsies themselves?

Writing assignment for Friday, November 15

Write a two- to three-page paper on study question 2. or 3. above.

Assignment for Monday, November 25

We will discuss Maass’s book in the usual way, but no paper is due. I’m counting on you to have read the book well enough to sustain a discussion -- the interest of the subject matter alone should see to that! If you are tempted to read only far enough into the book to get a sense of it and then stop, be advised that in chapter 5 we meet Slobodan Milošević, and only in chapter 6 do we meet our first armed Croats.

You may write a paper if you want to. If you got a grade on an earlier paper that you would like to have forgotten, write a paper on Maass for Monday, Nov. 25, and the grade for the Maass paper will replace your worst grade on any of the earlier short papers. Write a two- to three-page paper on either 1. or 2. Try to avoid simple answers, and document your argument with references to the book.

1. Maass, like Todorova, rejects the belief that "ancient hatreds" or "centuries-old rivalries" explain the Bosnian war. From what you know at this point, what is your judgment on that? What did cause the war?

2. Plainly Maass thinks the Serbs are to blame, by an overwhelming margin. How well does his account substantiate this belief? Do you have any reservations?

3. Should America have intervened earlier? What sorts of considerations should have dictated the decision?

Your assignment is to report on the web resources available for whichever Balkan country you signed up for (see the list below). Your report should have two parts:

• From among the sites you find, select and list eight to ten websites that you find notable in one way or another. (If you can't find that many notable sites for your country, tell me something about your search.) Identify the sponsor of each site, and comment briefly how the sponsorship shows itself in content or design, if that's interesting in any way. Briefly evaluate the reliability and usefulness of the site.
  
• From your list, choose one site that you find particularly admirable or useful, and one that you find particularly .... unhelpful, shall we say? Write a more extended evaluation, roughly a page, on each of these.

The sites you find don't have to be for the country as a whole, say Greece; they could be sites for local or topical concerns, like Athens, or Mycenae, or Corfu, or Olympic Airways, or the 2004 Summer Olympics. Obviously, they can be linked to each other, but one of them shouldn't be effectively part of another. If would be good (but it's not required) if you could find and evaluate one or more sites that intend to teach us the history of something. Be inventive in following things up.