Srečko Kosovel and the Hybridity of Modernism
SREČKO KOSOVEL AND THE HYBRIDITY OF MODERNISM Marko Juvan The Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Sciences, Scientific Research Centre of the SASA, Ljubljana,Slovenia The Distribution of Texts and the Aporias of Kosovel’s Reception The revolutionary idea that history is a narrative construct, an interpretation, has in the last thirty years become all but a truism, appearing even a little worn-out in the vulgata of the human sciences, and resting comfortably in the “common sense” of literary historians. In essence, they are nowadays well aware of the importance of the forms, practices and institutions of dis- tributing literary works for the interpretation and histori”al contextualisation of literature (cf. Dolinar - Juvan, eds., 2003). In other words, the cognitive sensibility for the mechanisms of representation of the past, for the channels and media through which it is observed and judged, is today a part of Kuhn’s “normal science”. The systemic approach also fits the general epistemologi- cal framework – with its perspective which captures texts amidst their liter- ary life, attached to the social and cultural circumstances of their production, distribution, reception and discursive processing through media, criticism, science or education (cf. Dović 2004). If we recognize these principles of literary history, a different aspect of the Srečko Kosovel paradox opens up:1 the incredible diversity of his poetic texts, condensed into a very short pe- riod of time, has been baffling the narratives of literary history and consist- ently outwitting any and all tools of periodisation. If we apply constructivist or systemic epistemology to the actual exam- ple of Srečko Kosovel, we might better explain the conflicting classifica- tions of his poetry within literary history, the aporias of his reception and canonisation, and the difficulties in shaping the poet’s cultural icon – the not so negligible reasons for this are precisely those anomalies in the his- torical processes of publishing and distribution of his work.
[Show full text]