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An Impossible Claim: Keeping a Textual Corpse Intact

A Reading of the Poem Protect my Respected Corpse by Tin Ujević

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this paper is to analytically approach a posthumously published poem by Tin Ujević entitled Protect My Respected Corpse. After a brief review of the current readings (Pavletić), the poem is close-read as a text on corporeality, materiality of representation, and the body, which necessarily transforms the poem into something other than what it is. Given Ujević’s interest in the physicality of representation, this paper draws on the insights of those authors who discuss it in different ways (M. Blanchot, J. Derrida, J. Lacan, M. Merleau-Ponty). Analysed in this way, the poem becomes an ironic comment on the limits of interpretation, and the surgeon-critic who, with surgical precision, mutilates and builds the text, reads into the poem new problems just to solve them himself/herself, in order to silence deadness, openness and ambiguity within the text. The proposed analysis of the poem is based on juxtaposing the text and its interpretation, the diffuse subject and its representations, the living body and the corpse.

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