Gendered Narratology in Progress: Gender-Conscious Novels in Recent Slovene Literature
Keywords:
Slovene literature, narratology, gender studies, feminist theory, sexual identities, homoeroticism, Tratnik, Suzana, Mozetič, Brane, Morovič, AndrejAbstract
Feminist as well as gendered narratology, which benefited in many aspects from the former, have since the late 1990s transcended the binarism of gender differences and adopted the concepts of sex, gender and sexuality for the description of formal and structural aspects of narrative. Several narratologists have started to develop gender oriented analysis of narrative text, explore specific narrative strategies (on story and discourse levels) and produce interpretations, that examine narrative costructedness and instability of sexual identities, including into their research the production aspects and the variables of the reception process. – In my article a brief overview of recent contributions to the field is offered. Further, a combination of feminist, queer and gender-oriented narratological assumptions is attempted, thus advocating the stand, that gender is constructed in narrative texts on the basis of textual markers, cultural clues, readers’ knowledge of author’s sex, his or her other published texts, and readers’ general knowledge. The aim of my contribution is to examine the interplay of sex and/or gender and narrative strategies, and, specifically, to foreground agents, focalization and unreliable narration in Slovene gay, lesbian and other gender-consious novels of the postcommunist period, written by Suzana Tratnik, Brane Mozetič and Andrej Morovič. I also deal with the dynamics of gender constructions in the selected texts and discusses their potential deviations from the principles of the coherence of plot and closure in traditional writing.References
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