Slovenska Literatura (Jul 2017)
A Prolegomenon to the Poetics of Slovak Literature after Year 1945
Abstract
Based on the research into Slovak literature after year 1945, it seemed necessary to form new poetics of the text and poetics of the event. The new poetics of the text stems from a key finding stating that, as opposed to the traditional idea of literary domination of social, historical and eschatological transcendence, what prevails in Slovak literature after 1945 in terms of values is the line of existential literature, whose core is found in the „existential moments of a human life" (Gumbrecht). In this respect, the research into the poetics of Slovak literature after 1945 is mainly focused on the poetics of existence. This means the poetics, the rules /grammar/ and the algorithms of the existential elements presented and represented in a literary manner. Within the new poetics it is the first time that the themes, the topoi and the tropes of a text have been interconnected, and the emotional tones have been formulated from the viewpoint of poetics, which was avoided as "unreliable" by the traditional poetics (in the 20th century it was mainly Structural poetics). Another thing that brings theoretical innovation of the research is the poetics of literary fields, where the intertextuality and intermediality of a text are performed in specific morphogenetic fields as "relating" (Miroslav Petříček). In this way, the research follows in the theoretical tradition of historical poetics. Poetics of the event represents a brand new area of research into poetics. It includes the performative rules of establishing an event at the scenes of writing, the pre-text operations aimed at the creation of a literary text as well as the production of a literary text thematizing the specific scenes of writing. The specific performative scenes of writing arise from the culture of presentation related to the issue of censorship and marginalization as well as the poetics of festivities that are created in opposition to the representative Socialist and pop culture festivities formed within the culture of presentation. From this point of view, the key terms of poetics of the event are configuration and reconfiguration of literary situations and historical events, the issues of what is called ´punktum´ (key points) and ´momentum´ (tendencies) of individual situations and the transitions between them. They are also a kind of rules of poetics, which can be seen, for instance, in the area of manifestos and programs, in the area of institutionalized as well as non-institutionalized literary life, in the area of distribution of literary texts, etc.
