English

This paper is part of a larger study on the essay film. It aims to explore more exactly the “essayistic” in and through film, where the essayistic indicates a kind of encounter between the self and the public domain, an encounter that measures the limits and possibilities of each as a conceptual activity. Appearing within many different artistic and material forms besides the essay film, the essayistic acts out a performative presentation of self as a kind of self-negation in which narrative or experimental structures are subsumed within the process of thinking through a public experience

In the following text, I want to look at the nexus of word and visuality that is so central to Ognyan Kovachev’s work (and to how important themes and stock images of world literature travel in time), and to do so with our recent pandemic crisis in mind. I take my cue from the importance, until recently also ubiquity, of the mask in order to examine the co-existence of word and image from a different perspective, moving also in a different geographical direction, from Europe to the Caucasus, where the consolidation of Armenian literature as a national literature takes place in the first two decades of the last century.

The theory of intertextuality shifted the focus of the literary scene from the literary influence towards the (critical) dialogue with tradition, and not only the literary one, but also the cultural one. Intertextual dialogue is a meeting/contact, a replica, a quote, a reminiscence, but also a conflict between two views of the world, between two discourses and two types of poetics. This conflict can take the form of parody, the grotesque, travesty, and carnivalization. Intertextual dialogue represents at least two authors’ perspectives and implies a temporal, cultural and stylistic distance. The author updates, but also revises the literary (archive, memory, oblivion) and cultural memory (collective, conscious, institutional, unconscious). It can be given in the form of quotation, remake, and evocative replica (zero dialogicity), but also (in the form of) revision and irony (high dialogicity). Poetry, traditionally defined as a monologic genre, practices intertextual dialogue as a strategy of performative reminiscence. Modernist and postmodernist intertextuality in contemporary Bulgarian poetry are a reflection of the local and regional socio-cultural and aesthetic environment. This interpretive essay makes a typology of intertextual dialogue in contemporary Bulgarian poetry with modernist and postmodernist characteristics: Lyubomir Levchev, Alexander Shurbanov, Georgi Gospodinov, Roman Kisyov, and Lyudmila Mindova.