Author: Marijana Bijelić
University of Zagreb
Published in Slavyanski dialozi, XX, 2023, 32.
Abstract: Ancient myths and religion plots as well as archetypes are often focused on specific conflicts between family members in a patriarchal context, the most important of which being those between son(s) and father(s), and those between brothers. Such conflicts find their (re)interpretation in modern scientific discourses (psychoanalysis and anthropology) as well as modern literature, which questions the stability of oppositions between science and literature and, on the other hand, that of science and myth. Family is often understood as a primary societal unit as well as a synecdoche for a given society, therefore the motives of family conflicts are usually related to the conflict and crisis in society, so modernism is often understood as a crisis of the traditional patriarchal order. Based on these premises, the paper analyses modernist interpretations of archetypical conflicts between male family members in Bulgarian literature relying on the Freudian tradition of interpretation, including Rene Girard’s reinterpretation of Freud’s oeuvre.
Key words: mimetic desire, patriarchy, crisis, parricide, fratricide, modernism