PARADOKSALNI PUSTOLOV ARSEN TOPLAK (ISUŠENA KALJUŽA J. P. KAMOVA I ŽANR BILDUNGSROMANA)
ARSEN TOPLAK, A PARADOXAL ADVENTURER (KAMOV’S THE DRIED UP MIRE AND THE GENRE OF BILDUNGSROMAN)

Summary/Abstract: After a survey of representative approaches and conclusions about the presence of features which correspond to the form of the didactic novel and the novel of formation, Janko Polić Kamov’s novel The Dried Up Mire/Isušena kaljuža is analysed as a special, paradoxical streak of Bildungsroman. The focal point of the analysis is the novel’s parabolic three-fold structure, whose parts (“At the bottom”/“Na dnu”; “In width”/“U šir”; “Up”/ “U vis”) narrate about the topic of the rise of the civilian selfawareness, from “intellectual sadism” to irony and artism, i.e. about a civilizational downfall into the institutional terror and the supremacy of the sensory-impulsive and material-pragmatic principle. Special attention is dedicated to the traditional (Dante, The Bible) and modern (Freud, psychoanalysis) interliterary/intercultural relations, which receive an ambivalent and inverted reflection in Kamov’s novel. Finally, it is argued that The Dried Up Mire is a distinctive “anti-educational” novel which simultaneously affirms the aesthetic ideal of modernism as well as challenges the conventions of the genre, and cultural and historical stereotypes.

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