Što je ostalo od lirike?
What is Left of the Lyric?

Summary/Abstract: Zoran Kravar’s early essay “Lirika i znanje” (“Lyric Poetry and Knowledge”) (1972) is revisited in light of contemporary poetic production and critical discourse, in order to assess the relevance and validity of his thesis that the lyric is a specific mode of speech that cannot be analysed or comprehended through the tools of cognitive reasoning. The latter is defined by logical and causal relations as well as grammatical structure, whereas the lyric abandons such procedures of understanding the world and instead turns toward an engagement with the materiality of language. In addition, a comparative reading of Kravar’s essay and Derrida’s “Che cos’è la poesia?” (1988) is undertaken, with reference to Marko Pogačar’s poetry collection Knjiga praznika (2022). What links these texts is the metaphor of poetry as a hedgehog, resisting more than one bleak diagnosis of the lyric’s decline in the face of technological progress and avant-garde attempts to merge poetry with life. Pogačar poetically moves forward by simultaneously distancing himself from so-called “realist” poetry and reactivating traditional modernist devices such as apostrophe, euphony, obscurity of language, intertextuality, and elitist literary communication between the text and the reader.

• Details
• Contents