The article deals with the semantic functions of literary space in contemporary Slovene short narrative prose. The modes in which writers create fictional universes by selecting settings with metaphoric or metonymic sense, the narrator’s perspective and protagonists’ actions are observed in the framework of the semiotic understanding of cultural geography. Kovačič, Božič and Hudeček are interested in the situation of the individual and in subjective experience, they stress the hidden
intimate and mental world of solitary, unsociable man. Quest, withdrawal or flight to another place are unsuccessfull strategies for overcoming tensions between the collective and the individual, the social and the natural. Even when man’s consciousness is set as the only reality, it is charged with ideology and political, historical and cultural connotative meanings. As man’s existence is contolled by conventions, norms and constraints, freedom is achieved in singular acts of transgression. Two decades later, freedom is conceived as an imaginary world with autonomous truth conditions. Kalčič, Filipčič and Kleč create a non-mimetic literary reality through play with language in which real and fantastic events, public and intimate spheres, and permissible and prohibited acts are intermingled. In the last twenty years Frančič, Virk, Morovič, Skubic and Čar have focused on authentic individual experiences. Direct perception is the basis of analytical thinking by means of which writers reveal delusions of happiness and freedom. Their awareness has become dynamic and global, they easily transgress the primary dividing line between domestic and foreign, their protagonists are economically, politically, socially and (multi)culturally sensitive. But emptiness lies beneath the glittering surface, the individual is lost in the anonymous crowd, reduced to performing a set of functions, imprisoned in his insignificant intimacy and increasingly indifferent to common/public values.
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