The paper is about the literary construction of social reality in the short story collections Pasijon (1993) by Brane Mozetič, as well as Pod ničlo (1997) and Na svojem dvorišču (2003) by Suzana Tratnik. Mozetič's views of revenge against a hypocritical society through "blood and sperm" and the flight into a world of narcotics and intimacy in the early short prose of Suzana Tratnik are two extremes of possible relations to social reality. Both authors lead their protagonists through different stages of time, and of psychological and personal evolution, so that it is justified here to talk about a Bildungsroman. As both authors often use homoerotic images and address questions of intimacy and sexuality, their protagonists are indirectly or directly involved in specific clearly defined social realities. These realities are not so much literary constructions, but in most cases relate to well known non-fictional conditions that reach into the field of politics, culture, the social mindset and literary production itself. These circumstances restrict the possibilities of free motion for homosexually orientated protagonists and form the background of aggression and self-destruction of Mozetič's protagonists, while in Tratnik they are the reason for withdrawal into alternative models of life which are again problematic and in themselves do not offer any way out.
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