Jessica Ortner (University of Southern Denmark), Tea Sindbæk Andersen (University of Copenhagen), Prof. Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi (the Hebrew University of Jerusalem). Chair: Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (Lund University) This roundtable is a book discussion on Reading War, Making Memory – remembering the Bosnian war across Europe by Tea Sindbæk Andersen, Jessica Ortner and Fedja Borcak (Berghan Worlds of Memories book serial, 2025). The book is the result of the interdisciplinary project “Mnemonic Migration” that ran from 2019 to 2023 at the University of Copenhagen. The roundtable presents the findings of the project and seeks to discuss the possibility of investigating literature’s capability to transport memories across geographical and cultural borders and perhaps to create prosthetic memory at its point of destination. The project investigated this question by combining literary close readings of chosen literary texts dealing with the Bosnian war with studies of circulation, publication numbers, professional reception and focus group interviews with lay readers in Germany, Denmark, the UK, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The idea was both to see how different types of mediation are read by readers in different national contexts, of different age, gender, and with varying degrees of pre-knowledge. Furthermore, we asked to what extent the authors succeed in targeting their writings to a specific readership – something that is especially important given that the memories already have travelled once with the authors who fled or migrated from Yugoslavia and mediate this travelled memory of the Bosnian war in a literary manner. We conceptualize this double travelling as mnemonic migration claiming that it isn’t enough only to investigate the media of memories but also the reception of these memories among real readers. The round table seeks to open a discussion about how we can bring empirical research of memory literature, mnemonic impact and readers’ reception further. Jessica Ortner will present the theoretical considerations behind the project, show how the book analyses the modes of memory-making and reads literature in a reader-oriented manner by investigating the text’s expected reader. Tea Sindbæk will present the results of the focus groups, arguing that premediations and memory frameworks shape the readings, but also that readers were sometimes encouraged and enabled to challenge their own existing frameworks Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the book’s methodological and theoretical approaches.
