The Analytic of Finitude in the Poetics of Bojić’s Drama Autumn of the King

This paper examines the poetics of Bojić’s play Autumn of the King, posing the question of genre of the “historical drama” in a theoretical context and looking at the function of the historical realia of the play in aesthetic terms, as a means of stylization of the historical themes and characters. By analyzing the language of the play as a vehicle for expressive, affective contents, the conclusion is reached that the play is a staging of the structure of language as finitude, and an embodiment of metaphor as a living performance. The linguistic analysis is informed by psychoanalytic and post-structural theories of desire, transgression, the gaze, and finitude. Finally, the plot of the play, centring on the Wagnerian love-death motif of modernism, is seen as the ultimate key to the poetics of Bojić’s lyrical drama of the fin-de-siècle, which makes Bojić an innovator of the Serbian poetics of modernism.