In this article, I present a brief outline of Slovenian literature, combining its history with the history of Slovenians. Although the generally accepted theses referring to the development of Slovenian literature include the lateness thesis, its development has nonetheless proceeded in the same rhythm as that of the rest of Europe. After 1960, the main literary movement became modernism, which was followed by postmodernism and, after 1990, a period of diverse authorial poetics. In Slovenian literary history, Goethe’s concept of world literature has been discussed since the first decades of the twentieth century. Today, there is a growing belief that synthetic presentations of world literature are impossible.

The present contribution addresses the question of how the novel Necropolis (1967) by Boris Pahor, a Slovenian minority author (with Italian citizenship) born in 1913 and living in Trieste, is placed in world literature. It sheds light on the novel’s path from the semi-peripheral Slovenian literary system to the canonical works of Slovenian (national) literature via various actors in the informal social networks of the globalised literary market and through its consecration in one of the prestigious intellectual and artistic centres of the world literary system (Paris), as well as through the mediation of translations into the dominant world languages. Attention is also given to the uniquely poetic character of this novel of memory about life in a concentration camp, which is a glocalised version of one of the world’s major literary testimonies of the Shoah.

Dane Zajc, one of the most prominent Slovenian poets of the twentieth century, repeatedly thematized man’s solitude, desperation, and other states of mind. This paper analyzes three selected poems by Zajc. In “The Giant Black Bull” he combined two types of speech, which could be ascribed to one or two different speakers. The main character, the bull, is characterized with a single act that invites different interpretations. In the fourth poem from the cycle “Two,” narration is combined with direct speech; again, characters and their dispositions, revealed by actions, speech, and figurative descriptions, are essential for understanding the poem. The poem “The Ear of the Mountain” diverges because the speaker’s consciousness tries to merge with some mysterious force that surrounds and transcends it. This article applies some narratological findings about the presentation of the mind in novels to lyric poetry through the study of Dane Zajc’s poetry. Traditionally, interpreting lyric poems includes (re)construction of the speaker, and narratology can provide useful tools to broaden the analysis. I propose that studying the presentation of the mind in lyric poetry raises two questions: 1) Who attributes states of mind to whom? and 2) What techniques are used to attribute states of mind? In lyric poetry, (implied) authors, speakers, and (implied) readers usually attribute states of mind to speakers; compared with narrative fiction, characters’ consciousness seems to be represented less often in lyric poetry (most obviously in dramatic monologues), and it is not usual for characters to attribute states of mind to other characters. Regarding techniques, one should observe categories for discourse presentation and the use of figurative or literal expressions.

In this paper, three contemporary Slovene novels are discussed in which the otherness of the literary figure is closely linked to the otherness of the literary language used: Vitomil Zupan’s Journey to the End of Spring, Berta Bojetu-Boeta’s Filio is Not at Home and Lojze Kovačič’s Childhood Things. The otherness of these novels is not only confirmed primarily within the context of the contemporary Slovene novel, but also in comparison with the world stage, where the Slovene novel represents a minority literature. The novel Journey to the End of Spring is different because of the main character Tajsi, who is an erotomaniac, a compulsive writer and a picaresque figure; as well as the otherness of the protagonist, the dynamics of the poetics is also shaped by the modernist narrative connected with the universal category of the neo-picaresque. The contribution of the novel Filio is Not at Home to the sense of otherness lies in the generic syncretism of dystopia, as well as in in the eponymous female character whose name, Filio, indicates a vision of the female and male principles being brought together. In the new millennium, the greatest sense of otherness has been brought to the Slovene context by the autobiographical novel Childhood Things, particularly the child’s perspective, the unreliable narrator and enigmatic descriptions. The very technique of this autobiographical novel is also different, combining realist and modernist poetics into realistic modernism; this connects smoothly with the difference of the main character Bubi, who in spite of his young age (from newborn to eleven years old) expresses himself with merciless candour, an innovative critical stance, radical provocation and consistent nonconformism.

This paper will examine how a text rhizome replaced the traditionally understood physicality of the book in the contemporary drama and theatre of two prominent Slovene theatre and drama (post)dramatists, Dušan Jovanović and Matjaž Zupančič. Both have demonstrated with their plays that the Slovene writing for the theatre was also headed for the waters disturbed by both the postdramatic turn and the performative turn. They bear witness to the fact that after these two turns, theatre texts tend to be in perpetual motion, in the process of semiosis. Therefore, nowadays the text in the theatre represents one of the elements in the weaving of various intertexts into a rhizome-like structure within the semiosphere of literature, theatre, and culture. The work of Jovanović and Zupančič thus played a significant role in the deconstruction of the so-called literary or drama theatre and in the manifestation of the performative turn.

Simona Semenič is a female Slovene playwright whose dramatic writing can be compared on the international level with Sarah Kane, Elfriede Jelinek, Anja Hilling and Ulrike Syha. They all have in common the search for linguistic and formal originality of expression, they strive for innovation in their dramatic writing, which will be heard in our world of media-shaped culture and bring an immanent theatrical solution. The paper considers three no longer dramatic texts by Simona Semenič: (1) The Feast or the Story of a Savoury Corpse or How Roman Abramovič, the Character Janša, Julia Kristeva, age 24, Simona Semenič and the Initials z.i. Found Themselves In a Tiny Cloud of Tobacco Smoke; (2) Sophia or While I Almost Ask for More or a Parable of the Ruler and Wisdom; and (3) 7 Cooks, 4 Soldiers, 3 Sophias. The main characters of all three are tormented and abused women, victims of religious and political wars, and of patriarchal patterns and imposed social roles; thanks to their thematic and formal similarities, the three selected dramas could form a trilogy. The fates of the women, which are based on real people, are presented in a fragmentary way within a timeless fictional frame, while Semenič, through innovative textual strategies, achieves artistic effects and contemplates ethical aspects from a universal perspective, and so her works are relevant everywhere. Her writing is characterised by the undermining of established reading conventions (absence of capital letters or punctuation, writing in verse form, etc.), whereby the reader is included more closely in the process of decoding and interpreting the text. The division between primary text and ancillary text is transcended, since the stage directions are more than just guidelines for staging and become an equal part of the text, with an emphasis on their narrative function (comment on what is happening, narration of events separated by space and time, a means of communicating with the audience, etc.). The addressee of the dramatic text must thus think about the basic relations, who is speaking and to whom, as well as about the status of the author, the dramatic characters and their own position. The reader/spectator is emotionally and cognitively more involved in what is happening and becomes to a large extent a participant and consequently shares responsibility for the state of society and the world. Although Semenič breaks the basic dramatic conventions, she at the same time relativises and revitalises them in metadramatic form, while the new textual strategies are most closely connected with the questions of reception and the power of theatre in today’s world.

This paper presents an introduction to a broader project that deals with the articulation and configuration of subjects in contemporary Slovenian poetry. In the theoretical introduction, I provide a brief outline of the different aspects and forms of dialogism defined by Mikhail Bakhtin and put forward some conclusions reached after my re-reading of Bakhtin’s thoughts on the monological nature of poetry. In the empirical section, I situate the chronological landmarks of the increased use of dialogism in recent Slovenian poetry and list the key authors involved. An introductory difference is made between the dialogic strategies that concern the structuration of the poetic discourse and its subjects on different levels of discourse (the speaking positions and the position of the enunciative subject) on the one hand, and representations of the decomposition of the “hard” conceptions of the (philosophical) category of the subject and/or the (sociological) category of the individual by using monological procedures in the structuration of the poem on the other. From the standpoint of poetic strategies, recent phenomena of dialogism on the level of the poem is often incorporated into the apparent monologic model of the subject configuration: the plurality of the poetic subject is introduced above all in the macro-system of the book and less in the micro-system of the poem or even the utterance. From the standpoint of the difference between external dialogism as the emergence of polyphony through the introduction of speaking characters, and internal dialogism where different strategies of the multiplication of point of views and voices occur within an apparently single, but decentered, speaking position, the former prevails in recent Slovenian poetry to the extent that we can speak of a strong current of polyphony. The remainder of the paper presents some examples of external dialogism that, according to Bakhtin’s typology, would be considered the external type of the two-voiced word: the introduction of the persona poem and the dramatic monologue (especially prevalent in women’s writing). It seems that the emergence of external dialogism is often a strategy used in the engaged thematic exploration of the intimate and social habitus that were kept in silence, while the very gesture of acquiring voice undertaken by until now “fragile” subjects — women, animals and even plants — is endowed with the symbolic value of subversive and transformative impulse.

The essay begins by mapping the multiplicity of cultural identity in the global context, drawing from different scholars on the issue to reveal that identity has become a hybrid construct. As such, identity relies heavily on discursive representations in literary and cultural texts. Studies of ethnic identities, therefore, concern how people of different cultural backgrounds interact with each other, how the migrating experiences are narrated and represented, and how such representations reflect the life experiences of the migrants. As a result of the complicated diasporic experiences against global migration, ethnic identity has become an ethical issue which governs human interaction, thus shaping people’s understanding of themselves, of others, and of the world.

Thane Rosenbaum’s novel Second Hand Smoke (1999) depicts Duncan Katz, a son of Holocaust survivors and a federal prosecutor of Nazi war criminals, as an ostensibly tough Jewish man inwardly tormented by rage and distress. This article argues that through its portrayal of Duncan, the novel offers a critical representation of the Tough Jew ideal. Specifically, the novel challenges the Tough Jew ideal for its premises on rage and for its close affinity with gentile masculinity. This article also contends that the novel points to the possibility of sublating the Tough Jew ideal and reshaping Jewish ethnic and masculine identities in the post-Holocaust era.

This article reads the representation of the London suburbs in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia against the tradition of English critical and literary engagement with suburbia. It argues that Kureishi gets beyond the stereotypes of the English suburb by representing it as a complex and meaningful cultural zone. He also highlights the suburb’s performative nature to demonstrate identity as an anti-essentialist concept. The article concludes by suggesting that, by endowing the London suburbs with more complexity and possibilities, Kureishi’s work contributes to the creation of new meanings and significations of the English suburb and participates in the reconfiguring of the English landscape.

Adopting Arnold van Gennep’s tripartite model of “rites of passage,” to study Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe, this essay traces Bailey’s rites of passage before and during his stay in Bailey’s café to unravel his national identity transformation. Before his arrival at the café, he experiences an identity crisis due to his American national identity, particularly with the atomic bombs. It leads him to separate from America and comes to the liminal street of Bailey café, which constitutes a blues matrix that calls upon the historical sites of the way station, allowing him and other castaways to gather, rest, and transform. Through his encounters with Stanley and Gabe on the street, Bailey is able to gain the affirmative and transformative power of the blues and reintegrate with his American identity. Thus, the essay argues that the ideological aspect of American’s national identity requires African Americans to transcend and to dream, and the blues empowers them to do so.

Post-colonial writing defines itself by seizing the language of the centre and by re-placing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place. It achieves its distinct definition through the processes of abrogation and appropriation. According to Bill Ashcroft the act of appropriation in the post-colonial text issues in the embracing of the “marginality as the fabric of social experience” (The Empire Writes Back 103). Set against the Opium trade leading to the Opium wars Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy delves deep into multiple discourses of marginality in dealing with the shared fate and facts in the lives of the motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. Deeti’s shrine (memory-temple) and Neel’s journals (archive) provide Ghosh the sound blend of what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the “affective” and “analytic” histories. By thus exploring the “unprecedented source of creative energy” (to quote from The Empire Writes Back) of the marginalized the Ibis trilogy affirms what Bill Ashcroft in his book Post-colonial Transformation has described as the “constructiveness and dialogic energy of the post-colonial imagination” (5). The history of the Ibis connects people from Calcutta to Canton, from Hooghly to Hong Kong and eventually reminds us of the common burden of the past. Ghosh’s fiction, due to the advantages open to it because of its very fictionality can imagine borderless blend of share and care, a blend which the material reality of our times demand so hungrily. If postcolonialism is “a language which grasps the global and the local by understanding of the complexities of imperial relationship” (to quote from Literature for Our Times: Post-colonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century) a study of the issue of marginality in the Ibis trilogy is alone sufficient to show that this language of postcolonialism is ever alive as it can endearingly embrace fictionality, historicity, and material reality by virtue of its inclusive interrogation, immaculate investigation and ingenious imagination.

Identity crisis is the new affair down the literary mannerism. And to extenuate it further female characters portrayed as the one displaced from their location. A woman when marries goes to stay with the in-laws which itself is socially acknowledged dislocation of the female self. In the novel Island of Thousand Mirrors there are prominent female characters that belong to war torn Sri Lankan society and their experiences during a certain time frame are implausible. Yashodhara, Saraswati and Lanka are the characters that draw attention because Yashodhara and Lanka are sisters of Sinhalese descent whereas Saraswati is a Tamil who later joins the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Consequently, this paper looks intensively into their lives and how they have evolved into some new identity and had cast away their previous lives. There is impact of violence as well, in their lives as they change their demeanor. Female dislocation is itself a transgression and the death of two female characters in Sri Lanka at the end of the novel relates to the journey and the affinity they have pulled through being apart.