SHORT EXPRESSIONIST GENRES AS A MODERNISTIC SIGN IN SLOVENIAN LITERATURE

Abstract

This paper raises the question of the existence of Expressionist prose as a significant segment of the Slovenian literary movement between the two world wars. It points out at a fundamental ambivalence about its relationship to the typological-aesthetic concepts of modernism and avant-garde. The problem lies in the fact that Slovenian literary historians and critics between 1920-1930, as well as the contemporary ones (with some exceptions), were detained and refused to accept innovative position of this phenomenon. Therefore, expressionism  was often understood simply as a radicalization of the poetic elements of  Slovenian impressionism (1895-1916), and this view is particularly evident in the assessment of Lado Kralj (Expressionism, 1986).

Due to the uncertain and indeterminate previous definitions of the expressionist prose, whose research  in German literary criticism, especially from the nineties to the present, yielded significant results (W. Sokel, S. Vietta, G. Kemper, B. Scheffer, W. Krull, A. P Dierick, I. Jens, T. Anz, M. Stark, W. Fähnders), there is a need for a new, more flexible pattern of the expressionist prose text. For the identification of this model the following aspects were taken into account: Poetical and conceptual aspects, Expressionist topoi,  Morphologic and narrative aspects, Stylistic  and linguistic aspects, following by Semantic Implications.

Textual base of Slovenian short expressionist  fiction includes 11 collections, published between the two world wars, and more than 200 prose pieces in the leading Slovenian magazines and  newspapers. Works of the individual authors  were recently acclaimed in publishing monographs, mainly posthumously (S. Majcen, M. Jarc, J. Kozak, S. Kosovel, S. Grum, E. Kocbek).

In the interpretation of a characteristic prose samples (Podbevšek, Kosovel, Grum, Pregelj, Kocbek) one can notice the type of discourse and style-rhetorical moves that shape the Slovenian short fiction (prose poem, sketch, short story and novella). Similar to German expressionism, in the Slovenian literary movement the short prose  genres play fundamental role in the process of a structural modernisation.