A(na)mnesiac: Memory and Intoxication in Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel The Ministry of Pain and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Paradis artificiels. On modernity of (Post-)Yugoslav Literature

This essay examines blurring of boundaries between memory, the experience of intoxication and the transformation of the self. It offers an account how these boundaries are both established and transgressed in one of the founding texts of modernism, Charles Baudelaire’s Les Paradis artificiels and the novel The Ministry of Pain written by postmodern (post-) Yugoslav writer Dubravka Ugrešić. The essay traces diverging and converging lines and their possible crisscrossing between memory and intoxication expounded in the two texts