NÁČRT PREMIEN SLOVENSKEJ LITERÁRNEJ KRITIKY OD POLOVICE 60. DO ZAČIATKU 70. ROKOV (2. ČASŤ)

This paper is concerned with the changes of Slovak literary criticism over a certain period of time. It reconstructs the process of the criticism becoming temporarily emancipated, i.e. the autonomous field of literary criticism was established in the mid-1960s, and, subsequently, it ceased to exist during the social and cultural „normalization“ in the early years of the following decade. The paper consists of three chapters; the first one presents two polemic articles by critic Milan Hamada (the argument with Vladimír Mináč and a polemic over Miroslav Válek´s collection of poems Milovanie v husej koži /Lovemaking with Goose Pimples on/), which made a significant contribution to forming the autonomous field of literary criticism in the mid-1960s. It defined its territory against the contemporary power structures as well as the literary field: criticism stopped serving and became, for the first time after 1948, an autonomous factor of the social context in those times. The second half of the 1960s was thus a short period of time when the relative emancipation of domestic literary criticism influenced by the external limits of the Socialist regime was finalized. The contemporary structure of the literary field, i.e. the genres and other forms of critical discourse, is discussed in the second chapter of the paper. The changes in the social situation after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 had a dramatic impact on culture and the humanities. A number of decisions made in the name of power severely affected the domestic literary criticism. Several of the significant critics were ousted from public life, some of the cultural and literary magazines providing space for reflection on literature were banned while other ones went through significant transformations. It was a gradual process, the outline of which is reconstructed in the final part of the paper. As a result of the interventions, literary criticism lost its autonomy and again came under control of political power just like in the 1940s and 1950s, although the new conditions were different.