The book before you, Arrogance and Bias, by the author prof. Matevž Kos is divided into three major topical ranges. The first brings five comprehensive interpretations of the most famous books, or rather poetic opuses, by Slovenian poets who put a significant stamp onto the 1990s. The first one, Sonnet as a Form of Recuperation from the Contemporary, is devoted to the breakthrough collection of more recent Slovenian poetry – Sonnets by Milan Jesih. Today this book has a reputation of being the pinnacle of post-modernism in contemporary Slovenian poetry. The second essay, Cracked Words, is a comprehensive contemplation on the poetry by Veno Taufer, one of the central authors of so-called Slovenian “dark modernism”. The next text – Genealogy of Loneliness – is dedicated to the book of poetry by Jure Porokar, Objects in the Void, while the essay A Woman, a Light and a Scorpion is dedicated to the poetry by Uroš Zupan, the leading author among young Slovenian poets. Essays Imperfective Verb To Be is contemplation on another breakthrough collection of contemporary Slovenian poetry – Limping Sonnets by Milan Dekleva. The second part of the book is mainly of theoretical and literary-historical nature. This is a comprehensive treatise titled Contemporary Slovenian Poetry and the Issue of Postmodernism which analyses and sets the question of the direction of the issue of postmodernism phenomenon in poetry (especially Slovenian poetry), if it exists at all, as by worldly standards the discussion on postmodernism usually revolves around prose and drama.
The third part of the book is (slightly provocatively) called Troubles with the Programme. By its primary intonation the text is critical and polemical, while the central question it sets is the relationship between the literature and ideology, between the culture and politics, as risen during the critical age of Slovenian process of becoming independent and democratized. Among others, the author pleads for a rigid differentiation of various levels – above all the state interference and immanent poetic practice, author and text. Hence the critical attitude to various theoretical and ideological “discourses” which have been seen as something conservative or ethical and morally non-binding over the past decade in young Slovenian poetry.