FOREIGN VS DOMESTIC IN THE CROATIAN DRAMA OF THE LAST DECADES OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Sa？etak In the Croatian drama of the second half of the 20th century, especially the playwriting from the 1970s and 1980s, characterized by intertextual experimenting with the structure of foreign literature, culture, mythology and history, one can easily identify the tendency of confronting these components with the elements of the Croatian literary and cultural space, i.e. with the traditional – both at the level of dealing with the formal (e.g. when using a verse), or with the narrative based on either oral or written literature. One gets the impression that the dimension of the dramatic text leaning on traditional Croatian literature is the result of the loyalty towards the home and the homeland. The use of features, even the ones of (from) the ？foreign？ world and its cultural supply are here embedded into the domestic literature. In the frameworks of the so-called postmodernist drama, such elements of shaping and confronting foreign with Croatian are visible in the work of many of our dramatists of the mentioned period: ？oljan, Slamnig. Ku？an, Paljetak, Bre？an, as well as in the younger generation of authors: Muji？i？-Senker-？krabe (triad), Lada Ka？telan, Mislav Brumec etc. In this paper the authors focus on two examples, i.e. two Paljetak’s plays – ？Poslije Hamleta？ (1993) and ？Orfeuridika？ (1996) – through which they want to demonstrate the relationship between the domestic and foreign in the last three decades of the 20th century, frequently characterised by emphasizing the national (and homeland) identity. In the second half of the 1990s, with the tendencies inherited from the earlier years – there is an obvious shift towards the era of globalization and ？vanishing？ of borders (between the domestic and foreign). Multiculturality thus – in the text and society – rests on the possibilities of assimilation (which always implies hierarchy, adaptation towards what is ？valuable？ to us), which in literature can occur through hypotext, i.e. when we deal with the (nonidentical) repetition (？Poslije Hamleta？) or the integration of the Other, that presupposes ？a difference？ to the assimilation (it may eventually lead to reconsidering of the term ？value？). Through Derrida’s absence and the above-mentioned difference, the authors review the status of the dramatic text as the author’s ？homeland？ where it (the text) has a double status: it is ？the host？ and ？the foreigner？