A Double Margin

TL;DR: The critical and historical reception of women writers on the Croatian and Yugoslav literary scene in the 1950s is characterized by double marginalization based on gender and avant-garde poetics.

Abstract: Studying the share of women in the historical avant-garde movements, Susan Rubin Suleiman (1990) supported Marguerite Duras's assessment of the avant-garde women writers as being “doubly intolerable” – since they do not correspond to the usual revolutionary point of view or that of women. Suleiman introduced the concept of the double margin to refer to the problem of critical and historical reception of women’s avant-garde writing. Since the procedures of the double marginalisation of women’s avant-garde poetics can be observed in different cultural contexts and literary fields, in this paper we will analyse the critical and historical reception of women writers on the Croatian and Yugoslav literary scene who contributed to the literary magazine Krugovi (Circles, 1952–1958) in the 1950s. Although this generation of writers interprets the aspiration of poetry towards a “universal language” (A. Rimbaud) following the avant-garde usages of grammar, figures of speech, and a depoeticised vocabulary, the traditional readings of women's poetics are often based on the expression of women’s experience, the mind and body split, and the biographical interpretation. On the other hand, the oeuvres of women from the Krugovi generation call for a revaluation of the relation between their poetic strategies and the possible gender politics of their poetry. Therefore, we will demonstrate the possibilities of this revaluation by turning to poetical choices, treatment of the lyric subject and the genre in the texts of Vesna Krmpotić, Vesna Parun, and Irena Vrkljan.