Today, Slovene dialect poetry is a very heterogeneous and internally differentiated cultural-artistic phenomenon. It is closer to productive self-evidence and receptive recognition and has its own advocates, interpreters and distribution centres. From relatively closed, linguistically independent geographical-linguistic areas it is becoming part of the wider cultural awareness and as a valuable regional speciality and mark of individuality. For this reason, it no longer attracts the attention only of ethnologists, folklore specialists and dialecticians, but also of literary specialists with cultural and sociological interests who introduce contextual aspects into research and evaluation. Even a few decades ago it was held that writing poetry in dialect was by definition limited and conditional – its exponents were socially deprived classes, minorities in neighbouring countries, those without literary education from less-developed, marginal regions – whereas now it is seen as a conscious choice. Regional or local speech is combined with a desire to preserve a disappearing or already disappeared world, past forms of collective life, above all the aspiration to directly express intimate individual experiences and emotions arising from a specific region and historical events. The literary use of dialect thus becomes a way of defining an individual’s affiliation, the individual and local identity that does not exclude the simultaneous presence of the national and the cosmopolitan or global within the same person. The aesthetic value of dialect poetry is a reflection of the unknown (unrecognised) difference of the other and arises from a paradoxical distancing from language formation and
attachment to it.
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