Croatian literature 2 3005-KL5LCH

The first semester continues to explore Croatian culture through the lens of literary texts of the second half of the 20th century. Key texts will be discussed from the mid-1960s (the mature generation of krugovaši) to the early 1990s and the great cultural and social change in Croatia. Attention will be paid to the social images encoded in the texts, as well as to issues of literary form and expression, their variability, and the problems of continuity and change. This period in Croatian culture brings experimentation with form and an exploration of the limits of the possibilities of language (linguistic poetry, krugovaši and razlogovci poetry). However, this period also sees the emergence of youth culture, represented by the jeans-prose generation. The 1970s and 1980s, on the other hand, bring an intensification of interest in popular literature and its ennoblement, the emergence of women's voice in literature (žensko pismo) and other phenomena typical of the postmodern period. A general feature of this period is the diversity, formal and thematic polyphony, and high creative receptivity wobe literary and philosophical discussions of the Western European and American circle. This was undoubtedly one of the most creative periods in the history of Croatian literature.
In the second semester, the focus of attention will be on ancient Dalmatian and Croatian culture, an object of particular veneration in the Croatian identity narrative that has been shaped since the 19th century. A special place is given to literature, acting as evidence of the cultural development and maturity of Croatians. Meanwhile, literature should indeed be a subject of reflection, but primarily as a source of knowledge about the cultural ideas, values and attitudes of the formerly living people. Knowing this helps, on the one hand, to understand past cultural practices and, on the other, to appreciate the issue of cultural continuity and change in Croatia. But not only: in the Croatian case, it is also a question of polycentricity, the coexistence and sometimes competitiveness of many local centres (Dubrovnik, Zadar, Split, Istria, Zagreb); the issue of non-Croatian-speaking heritage (Latin, Italian) for the national culture; the transculturality of past lifestyles, values and cultural practices, especially with regard to Dalmatians connected to the Apennine Peninsula and Croatian nobility living in the space of the Hungarian state.