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Partly parables, partly fairy tales, You Do Understand is a comedy of errors for a species of talkers who’ve never learned to listen. This collection of sharp, spare, occasionally absurd, cruel, touching, and yet always generous short-short fictions addresses the fundamental difficulty we have in making the people we love understand what we want and need. Demonstrating that language and intimacy are as much barriers between human beings as ways of connecting them, Andrej Blatnik here provides us with a guided tour of the slips, misunderstandings, and blind alleys we each manage to fall foul of on a daily basis—no closer to understanding the motives of our families, friends, lovers, or coworkers than we are those of a complete stranger . . . or, indeed, our own.
An instructive essay by poet and critic Ales Debeljak opens this introduction to the rich, post-World War II literary tradition of Slovenia, a nation that emerged from the former Yugoslavia in 1991 following a brief conflict that prefigured the Balkan conflicts that persist to this day. Part of one empire or another for centuries, Slovenia was denied a cultural identity of its own. Its writers, however, insisted on writing in their native tongue, thus keeping Slovenian culture alive in the written word. Contributors include Edvard Kocbek, Tomaz Salamun, Drago Jancar, Berta Bojetu-Boeta, and others.
The first volume of this three-part autobiographical series begins in 1938 with the expulsion of the Kovacic family from their home of Switzerland, eventually leading to their settlement in the father's home country of Slovenia. Narrated by Kovacic as a ten-year-old boy, he describes his family's journey with uncanny naiveté. Before leaving their home, he imagines his father's home country as something beautiful out of a fairytale, but as they make their way toward exile, he and his family realize that any attempt to make a home in Slovenia will be in vain. Confronted by misery, hunger, and hostility, the young boy refuses to learn Slovenian and falls silent, his surroundings becoming a social, cultural and mental abyss. Kovačič meticulously, boldly, and sincerely portrays the objective, everyday world; the style is clear and direct. Told from the point of view of a child, one memory is interrupted by fragments and visions of another. Some are innocent and tender, while others are miserable and ruthless, resulting in a profound and heart-wrenching description of a period torn apart by conflict, reflected in the author's powerful and innovative command of language.
Bringing together the analyses of the literary world-system, translation studies, and the research of European cultural nationalism, this book contests the view that texts can be attributed global importance irrespective of their origin, language, and position in the international book market. Focusing on Slovenian literature, almost unknown to world literature studies, this book addresses world literature’s canonical function in the nineteenth-century process of establishing European letters as national literatures. Aware of their dependence on imperial powers, (semi)peripheral national movements sought international recognition through, among other things, the newly invented figure of the national poet. Writers central to dependent national communities were canonized to represent their respective cultures to the norm-giving Other – the emerging world literary canon and its aesthetic ideology. Hence, national literatures asserted their linguo-cultural individuality through the process of worlding; that is, by their positioning in the international literary world informed by the supposed universality of the aesthetic.
With its echoes of fellow Austrian novelist Robert Musil's novella Young Törless, and of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Florjan Lipuš's Young Tjaž, first published in 1972, helped moved the critique of Germanic Europe's fundamental social conformity into the postwar age. But Lipuš, a member of the Slovene ethnic minority indigenous to Austria's southernmost province of Carinthia, wrote his novel in Slovene and aimed it not just at Austrian society's hidebound clericalism, but also at its intolerance of the ethnic other in its midst. When Austrian novelist and fellow Carinthian Peter Handke resolved in the late 1970s to explore his Slovene roots, the first book he picked up was Lipuš's Young Tjaž, which served as his Badeker through the Slovene language, and which he faithfully translated into German and published in 1981.
Znanstvena monografija odraža pestrost teoretičnih in metodoloških pristopov kot časovno in prostorsko širino obravnav. Avtorji obravnavajo odnos države in cerkve do izseljenstva (M. Drnovšek) slovensko izseljevanje intelektualcev v slovanski svet kot atipični pojav (I. Gantar Godina), emigrantsko literaturo in njeno mesto v slovenskem slovstvu in odnos domovine do nje (J. Žitnik), likovno umetnost kot vir za raziskovanje migracijske izkušnje z vidika ohranjanja in spreminjanja identitete (K. Toplak), žensko izseljevanje in njihove vloge pri ohranjanju etnične identitete v priseljenskem okolju (M. Milharčič-Hladnik), vprašanja multikulturalizma v evropskih migracijskih procesih in hkrati kot element razpoznavnosti in identifikacijske drugačnosti v odnosih do priseljenske skupnosti (M. Lukšič Hacin).