Master's thesis examines six short story collections by Andrej Blatnik (Šopki za Adama venijo, Biografije brezimenih, Menjave kož, Zakon želje, Saj razumeš? and Ugrizi) and the reflection of intertextuality and intermediality within them. The author’s writing is based on a dialogue with existing texts, which he intertextually transmits, imitates, and describes. The short story collections under examination contain a dense network of dialogues in which the short stories are constantly linked to other literary, mythological, philosophical, religious, and popular-cultural references. The role of intertextual and intermedial techniques varies throughout the author’s body of work. Intertextuality is most evident in the postmodern collections Šopki za Adama venijo and Biografije brezimenih, in which the stories engage primarily with the Bible, ancient mythology, international and Slovenian literature. Due to the author’s focus on minimalist poetics, the number of references gets reduced for the sake of economy of expression, yet they gain in depth of meaning. Intermediality is most frequently evident in references to artistic media, in which the stories incorporate musical quotations and film synopses. At the level of linguistic expression, the stories are stylistic echoes of the literary legacies of Borges and Carver, at the level of the textual world, they most frequently borrow literary characters and evoke motifs and themes reminiscent of canonical literary models.
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