Hvar City Theatre Days, Vol. 43 No. 1, 2017.
Original scientific paper
AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE IN THE POETRY OF BORIS MARUNA OR HOW TO SURVIVE IN THE DESERT OF FREEDOM
Ivica Matičević
; Institute for the History of Croatian Literature, Theatre and Music of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Abstract
Different aspects of American popular culture, from fast food to then-current art scene, are only some of the motives in the poetry of Boris Maruna who is, along with Viktor Vida, the best Croatian emigrant poet. Using humor, irony and satire while referring to the characteristic symbols of the country in which he ended up due to his interesting and nomadic destiny, Maruna in his poems dimensions his critical and disputing attitude towards America as the Promised Land. On the other hand, America is the country of concrete and organized political and social reality in which the adventurers of the mind could still find some respectable space of freedom, especially in terms of sexual liberalism and uninhibited physical behavior as a part of the popular culture, one of the frequent topics in Maruna’s poetry. His love for the homeland Croatia was never questionable. It was however expressed without any pathetic patriotic tones or weeping nostalgia, but with a critical and ironic detachment from the customs and habits of the Croats, thus significantly alienating Maruna from the typical matrix of both the Croatian emigrant poets and the writers in general.
Keywords
contemporary Croatian poetry; American popular culture; Croatian emigrant literature; sexual liberalism; literature and ideology
Hrčak ID:
192204
URI
Publication date:
8.5.2017.
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