Pursuing the Magic of Words in the Twentieth-Century’s Croatian and Serbian Literature Cover Image

Tropem magii słowa w literaturze chorwackiej i serbskiej XX wieku
Pursuing the Magic of Words in the Twentieth-Century’s Croatian and Serbian Literature

Author(s): Barbara Czapik-Lityńska
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza
Keywords: magic thinking; post-magic thinking; aesthetic experience; cultural experience; speech communication; extraverbal communication; imagination; word; symbol; sign; metamorphic identity

Summary/Abstract: The essay titled „Pursuing the Magic of Words in the Twentieth-Century’s Croatian and Serbian Literature” discusses transformations of the awareness of the avant-garde and postmodernism from the perspective of its relation to magic thinking. The essay advances a vision of poetic language and the main figures of the avant-garde’s imagination, especially the aesthetic conceptualizations of the messianic archetype. The avant-garde thinking about the world of unity (of the world-man-language) is utopian and not infrequently magic-esoteric. Postmodernism deconstructs symbolic language; it does not share the avant-garde’s belief in the existential and creative power of imagination and the word. The virtual culture of postmodernism reduces the value of the language sign and the referential function of language; it disenchants the conceits of the magic word.

  • Issue Year: 2013
  • Issue No: 04
  • Page Range: 43-62
  • Page Count: 20
  • Language: Polish