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 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.
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.
Quantitative approaches in studying literature already have a long tradition, reaching back to the period before digital humanities became an established field in the humanities. An important impetus ...for the establishment of quantitative methods in the humanities was provided by increasing computer power and increasingly extensive corpuses of machine-readable words. Theoretical concepts refer to the new methodological paradigms as distant reading. Even though it is supposed to replace close reading, it has repeatedly been shown that traditional research forms the necessary basis for relevant quantitative research and new relevant findings. Stylometry, or quantitative analysis of style, applies statistical methods to literary texts. The analysis entails text comparison in terms of similarities and differences in measurable text characteristics, such as the most frequent words. This is a well-proven method, which, however, has certain limitations. Stylometry is a text-immanent method that does not provide absolutely valid answers or general findings about style. In addition, the definition of measurable characteristics and the comparison method used remain in the domain of the researchers and their familiarity with the material. However, it allows a simultaneous overview of a large collection of texts and hence reaches beyond the established canon incorporating trivial literature and translated literature as an important segment of national literature, especially in its early periods. Stylometric analysis identifies text patterns, which can either be confirmed by qualitative research or can indicate the necessity for a new approach to traditional research. The visualization of results of the stylometric analysis of Slovenian narrative literature from the first half of the seventeenth century to the first original Slovenian narrative in 1836 shows the development of Slovenian narrative literature by period, with identifiable hallmarks of certain authors, and within individual periods and genres. Certain links indicate a need for further research.
On December 16, 2022, a bilateral Slovenian-Croatian phraseology working meeting was held at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana, at which the state of phraseology in Slovenia and ...Croatia was updated in a very concise manner. The organizer was the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana and, within this institution, the Department of Slovene Studies. The expert discussion took place according to thematic blocks, namely: 1) Methods, approaches and reviews, 2) Phraseology in dictionaries, 3) Teaching and learning phraseology, and 4) Current phraseological research. It has been confirmed that such working international meetings with the much-needed exchange of expert opinions and experiences are necessary for the smooth development of the profession and at the same time are also invaluable for their vision within the wider linguistic activity.
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