Neomedievalism and Criticism of the Enlightenment in Ivan V. Lalić: "Voyage Philosophique" and Four Canons.

Ivan V. Lalić's poem "Voyage philosophique" from his collection Script1 is usually read as a travelogue, but in this work it will be read as criticism of the Enlightenment programme, wherein the destination of "Holland" would, in fact, be a metaphor for this spiritual movement. Lalić's "lyrical criticism" is compared with its contemporaneous postmodern criticisms of the Enlightenment and is placed within the context of his poetics as a testimony of the modern search for some other tradition, older than the Enlightenment, which has 'severed' it radically. It is this tradition that Lalić approaches truly poetically in his last poetic expression--the collection Four Canons. This collection fully reveals the concept of neomedievalism, the New Middle Ages. This work examines the relation between an implicit deviation from the Enlightenment and an explicit step into the tradition of neomedievalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]