The discussion explores all four collections of short stories by Ivanka Hergold from a postfeminist perspective and concludes that the thematic and stylistic innovations in them were probably not an accelerator, but rather an inhibitor of canonization. Transgression, i.e. the transition to male or systematic identification with another gender or even another being, and the parallel non-idealized and nomadic identity of female characters, can also be understood as an obstacle to canonization, as the writer’s stories do not place female characters or female images at the centre, and only a fifth of the characters are female. The most paradoxical thing about the author’s work is that the very excess categories of her oeuvre have blocked her entry into the Slovenian canon, instead of opening the door wide: subversive modernist language, lyrical existentialism, desubjectivization of the subject, the marginal status of the little man, grotesque disillusionment, unpredicta-ble aesthetic impressions, ambiguous images, suggestiveness, aesthetics, empathy and mobile reading focus.
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