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https://doi.org/10.22210/ur.2025.069.2/07
Dubravka Ugrešić’s Avant-Garde "Métaterxies"
Marina Protrka Štimec
orcid.org/0000-0002-3764-5625
; Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Sažetak
The most important metatextual, “postmodern” books (Đekić 1995, Lukić 2001) by Dubravka
Ugrešić, "Poza za prozu"/"A Pose for Prose" (1978), "Štefica Cvek u raljama života"/"Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life" (1981), "Život je bajka"/"Life is a Fairy Tale" (1983) and "Forsiranje romana reke"/"Fording the Stream of Consciousness" (1988), are interpreted in this paper in the context of the author’s academic texts on the avant-garde. In her view, the avant-garde is by no means “used up” and cannot be reduced, even in postmodernism, to the museum or a mere “quotable” domain. In the series "Glossary of the Russian Avant-Garde", which she co-edited with Alexander Flaker, she analyses avant-garde gestures and subversive actions in contemporary Russian alternative literature, emphasising the questioning of existing poetic and political structures and the demythologisation of the “myth of the avant-garde”. Her “Oberiut” avant-garde poetics is evident in the use of intermediality, which encompasses both the de-literarisation of traditionally understood literature and the trivialisation of artistic content and orientation towards everyday life ("byt"), to which she refers, but which she also denounces as ideologically conditioned. By establishing the connection between the critical and reflexive use of avant-garde procedures and postmodern literary quotations in her academic texts, Dubravka Ugrešić also describes her literary process, in which “'byt' is the only measurable reality, but even this reality is cancelled out in a general grotesque context and transformed into the absurd”. Thus, in the title story of the collection "Life is a Fairy Tale", a witty, more or less darkly humorous “translation” of everyday life into literature (and vice versa) entangles the relationships between the characters and the author, bringing them into an engaged relationship with the source texts ("Večernji list", Amos Tutuola’s "The Palm-Wine Drinkard"), literary functions and procedures, social structures and expectations. It also engages with creativity and language, evaluating the metatextual-therapeutic effect of the performance. By rewriting Tutuola’s fantastic-folkloric history, Ugrešić also adapts his process of revaluation, as well as the analogous role it played in the translational efforts and in its neo-avant-garde, manifesto-style reception by the authors associated through the journal Krugovi, so-called "krugovaši", Antun Šoljan and Ivan Slamnig.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
341932
URI
Datum izdavanja:
22.12.2025.
Posjeta: 672 *