The novel Mocking Desire was published in 1993, when Drago Jančar was already a wellknown author, who had received some important literary awards. This hybrid and multifaceted literary work describes ...the Slovenian writer’s stay in New Orleans and in New York. Because Jančar visited the United States on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1985, his novel is read as an autobiography, although the author has not established an autobiographical pact with the reader (Lejeune). The aim of this study is to consider the autobiographical writing as a literary genre, the figure of reading, and the play with convention, in order to answer the question what provokes the autobiographical reading of Mocking Desire.
The study of autobiographical texts inevitably turns to the so-called extratextual real- ity, to writers’ biographies. The lives of these four authors born in Austria–Hungary were different. The ...German-speaking Slovene Alma Karlin became a traveller around the world. The first female professional Slovenian writer Zofka Kveder worked as a magazine editor, lived in different cities, wrote in three languages (Slovenian, Croatian, and German). The Slovene Maria Kmet worked as a teacher all her life. Maria Jurić Zagorka was the most widely read writer of her time in the Croatian lands and became the first Croatian female journalist. At the same time, their autobiographical experience reflected in the texts reveals much in common. The writers often changed their place of residence. The subject of the research is the spatial structures of four texts. In autobiographical works, there are specific spatiotemporal relations: the history of the formation of personality (the biographical time) is often connected with the expansion of space. First, an autobiographical character perceives only the space of a room (for ex- ample, a nursery), then the whole house. He or she makes various trips; often in the auto- biographies the spaces of educational institutions are described. As the characters mature, spaces expand and multiply. The autobiographical mode of narration of the four works under consideration deter- mined the spatial structures of texts, in which an individual–collective dichotomy is pre- sent. With the uniqueness of each human biography, all life paths reveal similar stages, which were reflected in the category of space. On the one hand, in many autobiographies, there are the so-called locus communis (the space of one’s home, the school, places for children’s games and walks, and a workplace). On the other hand, the geography of move- ments across different spaces is always unique. The similarity of some spatial motifs in the texts by Kmet, Karlin, Kveder, and Za- gorka can be explained by genre topics and general historical events (World War I, the collapse of Austria–Hungary) as well as the gender specificity of the texts (a big city gives a woman at the beginning of the 20th century the possibilities of self-realization, expands her social sphere but at the same time it is a dangerous space for her, full of temptations).
The article discusses the novel I Saw Her That Night, written by the prominent Slovene writer Drago Jančar. The plot of the novel is based on the documentary reports about the brutal execution of the ...spouses Hribar in January 1944. The Hribars were killed by the communist intelligence service and recently rehabilitated. Jančar’s novel is built against the background of WWII, yet the main focus remains on the personal fate of Hribar’s wife (her fictional name is Veronika). She is depicted (in tune with the documentary records) as an emancipated, attractive, rich young woman with a strong desire for an intensive life. The same personal qualities that make her attractive also prove to be fatal for her and her husband in the circumstances of the cruel war. The simultaneity of the liberation struggle, revolution, and civil war in Slovenia during WWII are still subject to conflicting interpretations and ideological appropriations, yet Jančar with his novel doesn’t want to enter into this dispute. He is interested in a personal tragedy caused by the larger, unavoidable, unforeseeable, unmanageable fatal circumstances. In order to avoid the ideological commentary, he chooses five personal narrators (Veronika’s voice, her point of view, is absent), all of the parts of the heroine’s life, who give their own accounts about Veronika’s life and about what happened to her. In this way, we are faced with a polyvocal, “Rashomonic” structure that avoids authorial, authoritative voice and offers various perspectives instead. This enables Jančar to represent the unrepresentable. The article juxtaposes this kind of artistic representation to the ideological approach, exemplified by A. Zupan Sosič’s reading of Jančar’s novel. Such a reading remains on the level of a pre-established perspective and remains unsusceptible to the advantages of artistic representation and to the ethical potential of literature.
The article deals with the image of the Second World War in three contemporary Slovenian novels placing them in the context of the contemporary Slovenian fiction production, where the topic of the ...Second World War has been increasingly present over the last decade: Drago Jančar’s I Saw Her That Night, Maruša Krese’s That I am Afraid?, and Maja Haderlap’s The Angel of Oblivion. In analyzing them, the paper highlights their similarities and differences underlining the potentials of the novel about WWII in general. Moreover, the paper outlines the development phases of the Slovenian novel after 1990, pointing out that WWII was not an appealing theme for the poetics of postmodernism which characterized Slovenian fiction in the second half of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. The author argues that the war – which in the Slovenian and Yugoslav context in the period 1941–1945 was inseparably connected to the issues of the revolution, anti-revolution, civil war, collaboration, and the communists coming to power – reveals itself to be productive and inspiring for the contemporary novel. Namely, this topic not only offers a broad historical and thematic field but at the same time demands a sharp ethical reflection, as does any literary representation of the ground-breaking historical events.
Soon after Slovenia’s proclamation of independence in 1991, the Slovenian authorities removed about 25,000 people (designated the “erased”) from the registry of permanent residents. They thus ...disenfranchised and turned this group into illegal aliens reduced to “bare existence” (Agamben). The removal resulted from the ethno-nationalist concept of the Slovenian state and became an instrument of its biopolitical governmentality. The powers that be sought to minimize the size of the ethnically non-Slovenian population, suspecting it of disloyalty and stamping it with the Balkanist stereotypes typical of “nesting Orientalism” (Bakić-Hayden). The distancing from the “Southerners” allowed the Slovenians to perceive themselves as holders of a pristine work ethic and the (central) European democratic culture, suitable for entry into the global empire of late capitalism. After a decade of silence, the topic of the “erased” flooded the media as a response to verdicts by the Slovenian Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights, which demanded that the state correct the injustice done to them. The political debate on their removal from the registry (the “erasure”) reached its peak during the 2004 referendum on this problem. Moreover, those that were “erased” organized themselves to fight for their rights in 2002 and their campaigns were supported by the international leftist activists and civil society. However, a discourse of “organized innocence” (Jalušič) prevails in relation to this group, similar to the denial of war crimes in the post-Yugoslav countries.
Vinko Moderndorfer (1894-1958) firstly published the Carinthian folk tale Mojca Pokrajculja in 1924 in the collection National Tales from Mežica Valley. In the next (extended) editions of ...the Carinthian Folk Tales (1937, 1946, 1957 and 1972) he published similar tales Deklica veka The Girl is Crying and Mojca Pokrajculja. Although both well-known, the place in the Slovenian Primary School Curriculum for 1 grade (2011) has text Mojca Pokrajculja , which is also better known. On the basis of the international classification (Uther 2004, 2011) Monika Kropej (2012, 2015) suggested for this tale classification under the number ATU 283C*. The basic type can include the motifs of folktale types ATU 15 (The Theft of Food by Playing Godfather ), ATU 283B* (The House of the Fly) and ATU 480A (Girl and Devil in a Strange House), and even the type ATU 123 (The Wolf and the Kids) or ATU 333 (Little Red Riding Hood). In literarure can be find intertextual reminiscences (Juvan 2000) with the Grimm folktale Wedding of Mrs Fox (KHM 38, ATU 65 The She-Fax's Suitors). Due to intertextuality Mojca Pokrajculja can be classified also as Formula Tale or Chain Tale, based on the sequence of animals (chains based of numbers, objects, animals, names, death, eating and other events).
This article deals with Slovenian poetry written by women in the last two decades and focuses in particular on the use of so-called external dialogism. In the introductory section, I present a brief ...outline of the historical position of women poets in the Slovenian literary system along with structural changes that have occurred since 2000. Although these changes have had a positive influence on both poetic production by women and on its overall reception, statistical data reveals that the Slovenian literary field remains largely phallocentric. In the second section, we analyse recent women’s poetry published in Slovenia, finding in it many of the female attitudes toward the patriarchal symbolic order identified by Julia Kristeva: namely, accommodation and appropriation, and subversion through an exploration of its constitutive mechanisms. At the same time, we argue that all phases in the development of women’s writing defined in Elaine Showalter’s gynocritic are present in contemporary Slovenian women’s poetry: protest, imitation and accommodation, self-discovery and self-exploration. Although Saša Vegri was one of the first to begin this emancipatory process in late 1960, radical critiques of the symbolic order appearing in women’s poetry were rare and sporadic, and the majority of women poets in subsequent generations drew upon the same patrilinear tradition at the beginning of their poetic careers. In the generation of women poets born around 1970, the emancipatory approach was followed most systematically in Taja Kramberger’s poetry, and in the next decade in the work of Alenka Jovanovski and Ana Makuc. Female authors of the 1960 generation, Barbara Korun and Maja Vidmar, also increasingly stepped out of the accommodational mechanisms of patriarchal structures and began to investigate the neuralgic points of the symbolic in a more daring manner. Authors confronting patriarchally-formed mental, socio-cultural, and enunciative patterns generally use two strategies in reconstructing their own discursivity: the concept of the fictive persona, and the dramatic monologue. We provide a brief historical outline of these poetic techniques, incorporating both in so-called external dialogism, a category drawn from Bakhtin’s typology of dialogic relations in prose fiction and transposed onto lyric discourse. In the rest of the paper, we analyse poetry collections by Taja Kramberger, Katja Gorečan, Barbara Pogačnik, Barbara Korun, Ana Makuc, and Maja Vidmar. The theoretic framework for the analysis is a reconceptualized view of the lyrical subject, using concepts such as focalization in the analysis of the lyric. The article comes to the conclusion that the persona poem and the dramatic monologue are principle strategies used to explore the intimate and social habitus that had so long been maintained in silence, the very gesture of acquiring voice undertaken by hitherto “fragile” subjects – women, animals and even plants – endowed with the symbolic value of the subversive and transformative impulse.
The article attempts to detect and describe the change of the paradigm in contemporary Slovene poetry. If most of the Slovene poetry after the Second World War, or to be more precise, from the late ...1950s onwards, was written in the modernist key, with the “serious” existential themes and often dark and hermetic speech as prominent features, we may assume that in the 1980s this kind of poetry was slowly beginning to disintegrate. Although in this decade the so-called neo-avant-garde (or ultramodernist) poetry, which surfaced in the 1960s, became almost obsolete, the poetry of Tomaž Šalamun, the leading voice of the Slovene neo-avant-garde poetry, functioned as some sort of the major catalyst for the new poetry. If we may borrow the distinction between the “cooked” and “raw poetry”, first used by Robert Lowell with regard to the new American poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, we can detect such new poetological tendencies that focus on the mundane themes of the everyday urban life, often written in a spontaneous and sometimes colloquial language, free of formal and metaphysical maneuvers of the so-called “academic”, “cooked”, or “moderate” modernism. To illuminate this poetological transition, the article focuses on the year 1991, which coincides with the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the formation of Slovenia as a new national state. In this year, many of the new young poets started their poetical careers. The brief analysis of the poetical debuts of the poets such as Brane Senegačnik, Vid Snoj, Miklavž Komelj, Jurij Hudolin, Peter Semolič, and Uroš Zupan attempts to demonstrate that most of the poets are still indebted to the modernist paradigm (with Dane Zajc and Niko Grafenauer as its main representatives), but nonetheless, in some cases, the traces of the new, “cooked” urban and narrative poetry can be observed on the margins of these debuts. These elements, however, are the most prominent in the book Sutre, written by Uroš Zupan, who also happens to be most influenced by the poetry of Tomaž Šalmun on the one hand and the American poetry of the beat generation and New York School on the other. These influences were of the utmost importance in the first stage of the new poetic paradigm that at the beginning of the 1990s strove to overcome the modernist literary tradition. The poetry of Uroš Zupan thus paved the way for the new mainstream of the contemporary Slovene poetry that appeared in the new millennium.
The creativity of Aleš Debeljak, a prominent Slovenian poet, sensitive essayist and public intellectual, can be divided into three parts: deeply personal poetry, professional or scholarly work, and ...socio-political essays or commentaries. These three parts, although different from one another, are loosely linked together by the trigger of Debeljak's creativity: the individual's responsibility to society and fellow human beings. Debeljak's essays are especially memorable since they are mostly related to the space that defined him from his childhood, i.e. Yugoslavia, but above all to its terrible devolution. The article explores three of Debeljak's texts: Twilight of the Idols, Balkan Footpath and How to Become a Human Being and its aim is to examine the occurrence of the topic of Yugoslavia in them. The three selected texts have been written over a period of twenty years and all three reveal Debeljak's unbearable pain caused by the collapse of the multicultural, culturally rich community that offered the foundation for the creation of his own version of identity, which he proudly called cosmopolitan. Debeljak transferred his identity from the national plain to the cultural one – cultures that offered him immeasurable freedom and wealth became the existential provision that defined his essence. Twilight of the Idols is undoubtedly Debeljak's darkest essay on the new state of the world, which he called his ”own”. Originally published in 1994, when the bloody armed conflicts in the former republic of Yugoslavia were in full swing, this essay was among the very rare voices in the former homeland which lamented its collapse. Debeljak was well aware of the devastating power of nationalisms that dominated this area and thus destroyed the delicate tissue of cultures. The second book, Balkan Footpath, was published in 2010, that is a decade and a half after the end of the conflict, but still revealed Debeljak's profound sorrow. In it, Debeljak pays tribute to all those writers of the former common homeland who inspired him on the path of shaping his own identity, such as Ivo Andrić, Meša Selimović, David Albahari, Muharem Bazdulj, also Charles Simic, but his main attention goes to the two great Serbian authors, Miloš Crnjanski and Danilo Kiš. With the last of the selected books, How to Become a Human Being, Debeljak returned to his earliest years in the last decade of Yugoslavia's existence. In his comments, Debeljak follows the intimate memories from his childhood and early teens, describes events and experiences that have affected him, many of which are linked to Yugoslavia.
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