Rivers In Crisis
The Danube, Drava, Drina Network
This interdisciplinary, multilingual, and transnational project explores literary and filmic narratives of risk and opportunity resulting from the geographical and cultural connections between the rivers Danube, Drava and Drina. Located at the intersection of German and South Slavic Literature, the project investigates those three liminal waterways as borders and passageways that connect Austria and the Western Balkans in the cultural imagination through diverse challenges and mitigations. Due to their function as liminal contact points for different linguistic, ethnic, and religious populations, these rivers have always been subjected to complex power dynamics, in which notions of purity and ownership were consistently pitted against the hybridity and transnationality of these natural spaces. But despite efforts to control the Danube, Drava, and Drina through increased river engineering (straightening, damming, deforestation) and monitoring measures (barriers, surveillance technology, patrols), these waterways have remained volatile sites of natural and human crisis (such as floods, draughts, human trafficking, and migration). Consequently, the project investigates how Austrian and (ex)-Yugoslav prose, travelogues, folk tales, poetry, and film from the First World War until today relate to ecological, economic and political crises through the motif and trope of rivers (taking the Danube, Drava and Drina rivers as the main case studies). By creating a transnational map of literary and filmic river narratives, this project will foreground the cultural ties created within this transnational river network through experiences of crisis, as well as the possible strategies for individual and collective resilience that arise from them.
Project lead: Yvonne Živković
Team: Stefanie Populorum
Partner: Astrid Kury, Akademie Graz
Liminal River Narratives Between Austria And The Balkans
This part of the project traces the transnational connections between Austria and the Western Balkans comparatively, investigating how the river narratives about the Danube, Drina, Drava, and Sava make visible the historical and intercultural entanglements between those two regions. Due to their function as liminal contact points for different linguistic, ethnic, and religious populations, the Drina and Sava rivers in particular have surfaced as crucial memory sites in the cultural imagination of Croats, Bosnians and Serbs over several centuries. Being conceived as natural habitat and social environment at the same time, these rivers surface as important actors in literature, music and film in the region, emerging as sites of war and destruction, mobility and displacement, reconciliation and rehabilitation.
Key literary texts by Ivo Andrić, Peter Handke, Faruk Šehić, as well as feature and documentary films by Goran Rebić, Matthew Somerville and Bojan Bojić in order to elucidate how liminal river narratives serve as crucial identifiers for collective belonging and national heritage in the 20th century, especially during historical crisis moments.
Researcher: Yvonne Živković
Keywords: ecocriticism, rivers, migration, comparative literature, liminality
Ecocritical and Posthuman Perspectives on the Danube in Austrian Literature
This project explores the Danube as a liminal and archival space in 20th- and 21st-century Austrian literature, focusing on ecofeminist and posthumanist theories, with an emphasis on hydrofeminist approaches. Examining works by Friederike Mayröcker and Frieda Paris shows how the river is depicted not merely as a scenic narrative backdrop but as an agentive and relational charged presence. By overcoming a world structured in dualisms (human/non-human, nature/culture, male/female, I/other etc.), Mayröcker’s and Paris’ poetry offer an understanding of the river as a an entity intertwined with human experiences, enabling friendship, mentorship, and shaping identity.
My approach draws on the concepts of Astrida Neimanis and Donna Haraway, who both frame the world in terms of entanglements—through hydrofeminist relations of bodies and water, and through posthumanist networks of human and non-human agents, technologies, narratives and discourses. Combining close reading with feminist and eco-critical methods, my research investigates how literature renders the Danube’s symbolic and material agency visible. The project contributes to debates in literary ecology, feminist environmental humanities, and posthumanist theory, offering new insights into how Austrian literature navigates the complex relationships of waterways, culture, and ecological life.
Researcher: Stefanie Populorum
Keywords: hydrofeminism, hydrocommons, ecofeminism, posthumanism, Danube, entanglement
