Jovan Bukumira

Jovan Bukumira (b. 1992) earned his BA (2015), MA (2016), and PhD (2024) from the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. His research focuses on modernist and avant-garde literature (particularly surrealism), contemporary literary theory, Yugoslav studies, and cultural and
periodical studies.

Bukumira’s MA thesis, Giambattista Vico and Erich Auerbach: Literature, Philology, History, examines the key ideas of Vico’s philology and their reception along the main trajectory of European philosophical and aesthetic thought – from Romantic historicism, G. W. F. Hegel, and F. Nietzsche, through B. Croce, N. Frye, K. Burke, and H. Bloom, to H. White and E. Said. It then highlights their fundamental significance for Erich Auerbach, Vico’s most thorough student, and his understanding of the relationship between historicity and the theory of (literary) interpretation.

Bukumira’s PhD thesis, Essays of Serbian Surrealism: Marko Ristić, Dušan Matić, and Oskar Davičo, builds on R. Musil’s notion of essayism, R. Rorty’s concept of literary culture, and M. Macé’s ideas about the essay as a “style of thinking” inherent to literary tradition. The work establishes strong ties between the generic features of the essay and the poetological
traits of the avant-garde, such as nonlinearity, associativity, performativity of expression, theatricalization of experience, and the integration of living and writing. Bukumira demonstrates how the essays of Serbian surrealism – unique examples of a Lévi-Straussian textual bricolage – embody a complex vision of temporality, a robust theoretical interplay between Marxism and psychoanalysis, a distinctive combination of the private/autofictional and the public, recognizable literary politics, and an innovative polyphonic structure, serving as one of the rare remaining forms mediating the wholeness of human experience.

He was one of the founders and a long-time member of the student association of the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, Club 128, participating in the organization of two regional student conferences, numerous lecture and seminar series, and hosting a student radio show.

Bukumira has been affiliated with the Institute for Literature and Art (IKUM) in Belgrade since 2018, initially working on a project dedicated to the study of periodicals and later at the Department of Literary and Art Theory. He was a member of the bilateral project Modernism and the Avant-Garde in the Yugoslav Context (2019–2022), carried out in collaboration with
the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. He served on the Organizing Committee of the international conference Marcel Proust (1922–2022) and is currently co-editing the volume of papers Sur/realism (1924/2024), while also contributing entries in literary theory and cultural studies for the Dictionary of Literary and Cultural Studies (IKUM). Bukumira has edited the reissues of two Serbian surrealist novels: The Root of a Vision (Koren vida, 1928) by Aleksandar Vučo, and Cash and Carry (Plati pa nosi, 1948) by Đorđe Jovanović.