THE DISAPPEARING LYRICAL SUBJECT IN CONTEMPORARY SLOVAK POETRY. ON TEXTS BY REPRESENTATIVES OF THE TEXT GENERATION

Abstract

The current study focuses on some of the transformations of the lyrical subject in contemporary
Slovak poetry after 1989. The chosen authors are representatives of the so-called Text Generation – a poetic group defined by the Slovak critics – and appear to be key figures in the development of postmodernism in Slovak context. Peter Macsovszky is considered a leading postmodern poet in literature after 1989, and Michal Habaj is seen as his follower calling himself ‘a big epigone.’ The main problem investigated in their works is the reduction or the negation of the category of the self. Both authors made their literary debuts in the '90s and are seen as part of the experimental deconstructional line in Slovak poetry. Their books ‘Fear of Utopia’ and ‘80-967760-4-5’ include self-referential texts in which the poets play with the categories of author, subject, and literature itself.
The interpretation of the selected works is based on the authors’ concept of writing as an act of constructing a text reality enclosed within itself and reflecting on the literary terminology which is made by. Their works not only reflect on intertextuality as a literary concept, but in the case of Michal Habaj try to be tendentiously intertextually connected to works by Peter Macsovszky. In the texts, we see the reduction of the self to a grammatical form as leading to something of a disappearing lyrical subject.