A View of Ljubomir Micić\u27s Avant-garde Strategies and Tactics of Dismantling the Literary Canon

The essay presents an analysis of the tactics of forming a literary canon in Yugoslavia and Croatia at the beginning of the twentieth century in terms of modernist culture on the one hand, and it’s rejection by avant-garde Zenitism poet Ljubomir Micić on the other hand. The essay singles out the avant-garde strategies and methods of European Dadaism and Futurism which are locally applied in the Yugoslav and Croatian literatures at the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as avant-garde strategies of Zenitism. Ljubomir Micić relativizes canonical assumptions and ideologies, using avant-garde poetry tactics of subversion, experiment, radicalism and excesses, and affirming his own local response in poetic Zenitism. Micić undermines not only the literary canon, but also destabilizes and challenges the social function of literature, ethics, values, ideals, and literary genre structure of modernism. Through Micić’s subversive tactics, the marginal tactics and metapositions of operation, we come to a position where it is possible not only to expose the literary canon, but also reveal the current signs of mechanisms for a global redefinition of culture and society