Sonja Novak
(Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Croatia)
30 September 2026 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84553213152?pwd=eA0cWaUMhsqSAMzbCwAEnMJR2XlbFL.1
Meeting ID: 845 5321 3152
Passcode: 952969
The lecture is organized as part of the APVV Memory, Space and Identity in German-Speaking /Transcultural/ Literature from Modernity to the Present.
Alexander Roda Roda, a Czech-born German-speaking author from Slavonia from the turn of the 19th into 20th century, often employs in his writing the practice of turning his real biographical experiences into highly stylized, satirical, and anecdotal fiction covering the broader multicultural context of the Austro-Hungariian Monarchy. By treating his life as raw material for entertainment, Roda Roda intentionally blurred the lines between individual memory (“personal story”) and the collective reality of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire (“history”). This literary technique manifests itself through several distinct thematic and narrative mechanisms; 1. he (re)created his fictional persona (e. g. pseudnym as brand, myth of the red waistcoat and narrator as character), 2. he satirized military history (after his dishonourable discharge, he deconstructed the imperial grandeur, wrote anecdotal (hi)stories of the military and also spent time as a war correspondent) and 3. in his works he reflected the geographic and cultural hybridity of the time to strategically bridge cultural divides (e. g. through so called exotization of the Self, representation of frontier settings and implementation of lighthearted irony in reflecting political and social turmoil). By making his life the ultimate punchline, Roda Roda demonstrated that (personal) history is not a fixed ledger of facts, but a narrative playground. His approach to autofiction captured the psychological atmosphere of a dying empire far more vividly than many formal history textbooks of his era.
Assoc. Prof. Sonja Novak, PhD (Department of German Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Croatia) obtained her PhD in 2013. Since december 2014 she has been employed at the faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Osijek, with fellowships for longer international research stays in Pécs, Hungary (2017) and Vienna, Austria (2018, 2021). She has published over 60 academic publications. She is editorial board member of academic journals Writingplace Journal for Architecture and Literature and Journal of Narrative and language Studies (Scopus Q2). She also serves as peer reviewer for publications and scientific project proposals at national and international level. She has actively participated in several international projects as research associate, but also with leading roles (e. g. COST CA18126 Writing Urban Places. New Narratives of the European City (2019–2023, WG2 leader). She was PI and project manager of the Croatian national research project UIP-2020-02-3695 Analysis of Systems in Crisis and of New Consciousness in 21st Century Literature (2021–2026). Full profile and list of publications is available at the official Croatian Researchers’ portal CroRIS and Google Scholar.