Authors

Karlis Verdins¹;  ¹ University of Latvia, Latvia

Discussion

In the 1970s, during the period known as "stagnation", a student of the Faculty of History and Philosophy of the University of Latvia, Jānis Silenieks (nickname Džonītis) wrote poems that circulated among his friends. In his poems, he expressed his inner struggles as a young queer man who had complicated relationships with his sexual identity and reacted emotionally to themes of body, sexuality, and fitting into society. To understand his poetry, the concepts of "weak modernism" by Paul Saint-Amour and "ugly feelings" by Sianne Ngai should be employed. Both modernist studies and affect theory have the potential to provide insights into Džonītis' poems as reservoirs of negative emotional experience as well as "bad" poetry that could not be published before 1990.