Micropoetics and Its Contexts

Abstract

The article attempts to place micropoetics on the map of contemporary cultural phenomena and within the context of other areas of scholarship. The author treats micropoetics as a subjective quasi-method in scholarly literary studies, oriented toward detailed, in-depth analysis. She shows the traits that connect it with traditional philological scholarship, as well as what constitutes its innovative element: an individualized reading strategy, adapted to the object of analysis, an individualized approach to the work, and the self-consciousness of the scholar-micrologist, who takes a distanced view of his own judgments and is conscious of their situational nature. The main distinguishing feature of micrology becomes, in her reading, its attentiveness, discussed here as a historically legitimate category.