Pjesništvo J. Severa i problemi proučavanja neoavangardne književnosti
The Poetry of Josip Sever and the Problems of Studying Neo-Avant-Garde Literature

Summary/Abstract: Broadening the scope of research on the poetry of Josip Sever by analyzing his “Labour Day” poems published in the journal Oko during the mid-1970s, this article discusses the ways in which Sever’s treatment of the avant-garde tradition changes in different contexts, and hence offers an alternative reading to the stereotypical interpretations of Sever as a postmodernist antiutopian writer. Sever’s poetry is thus revealed to be positioned in manifold ways in relation to a variety of intertextual coordinates ranging from the Soviet avant-garde to the local literary tradition. His poetry interprets and articulates such protocols in a distinctive way, ambiguously upholding the avant-garde’s constructive project. Furthermore, detecting the difference in the intertextual treatment of the avant-garde in Sever’s two collections of poems, on the one hand, and in the Oko poems, on the other, is useful for a more refined understanding of the basic categories in Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-garde, especially the scholar’s distinction between the neo-avant-garde and the so-called post-avant-garde stages in art.

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