Aesthetics, Spectacle and Kitsch in Literary Representation of the Sarajevo Siege

Aesthetics, Spectacle and Kitsch in Literary Representation of the Sarajevo Siege by Dragana Obradovic This article explores the points of intersection between the discourses of modern warfare and postmodernist poetics in Semezdin Mehmedinovic's collection Sarajevo blues. It begins by considering Mehemdinovic's own appraisal of the Sarajevo siege (1992-95) as an economy in which documentation of the conflict interacts and colludes with the war itself. It subsequently analyses the formal attributes by which the author's poems and prose pieces contemplate the amorality or the immorality of producing art in a war zone, of aestheticizing death and ruin but also of commodifying it through kitsch.