The Young Literary Critic (and Scientist) Peter Zajac

Abstract

The paper written on the occasion of Peter Zajac´s 70th birthday looks back at his beginnings as a literary critic in the late 1960s. At that time he formed a polemic stance on the domineering discourse of the 1960s, however, from the outset of normalization in the 1970s he adopted many elements of Milan Hamada´s ethical and noetic conception. The following decades saw him mainly advocating the variety of Slovak literature and its genres. The paper characterizes the algorithm of Zajac´s cognitive methods as he developed it in his scientific writings aimed at the formation of a dynamic model. The lifelong basis of his relation to reality is the feeling of permanent crisis. It is a positive understanding of crisis as a productive situation, which makes a self consciously reflect on each life situation and make decisions, which in effect make the system more dynamic and initiate the process of establishing functioning structures.

Keywords

• peter zajac
• literary criticism
• the 1960s
• mladá tvorba
• normalization
• cognitive algorithm
• organizational activities