Slovenská literatúra

4

Authors: Zuzana Bariaková

Daniel Hevier: The acknowledged prose of Ján Johanides

6

Authors: Irena Bilinska

Magdalena Bystrzak, Radoslav Passia, Ivana Taranenková, ed.: Contacts of literature (models, identities, representations)

11

Authors: Peter Darovec

The article deals with controversies concerning the authorial self-presentation of the Slovak writer Peter Pišťanek (1960 – 2015) and changes his attitude towards the role of the writer underwent. In the 1990s, when Pišťanek was a publishing author and his work was widely discussed, he ostentatiously rejected the status of the writer. However, later, after he stopped being active as an author, he partially assumed it. Until then, he would repeatedly present himself as a non-elite word craftsman (worker). This radical public gesture brought him a unique position in the Slovak literary field in the early 1990s. He would degrade the status of the writer both in his public self-presentations and in the key works of his first creative period. In these, the characters of writers are portrayed with a radical irony. Paradoxically, at the break of the 21st century, after he publically declared that he no longer writes fiction, Pišťanek embraces the role of the celebrity author. This shift can be observed in his editorial activities, in interviews and journalism he authored at that time. Empathetic understanding of the character of the writer replaced the former ironic detachment.

12

Authors: Miroslav Zumrík

This review essay discusses the monograph Love in Numbers: Sládkovič’s Marína from the viewpoint of quantitative linguistics authored by Michal Místecký, Natália Kolenčíková, Martin Navrátil and Gabriel Altmann (Bratislava: Veda, 2020). The book is a significant contribution to quantitative research of literary texts, a field currently viewed to a large extent as part of Digital Literary Studies. Using mathematical tools in the research of literary genres is not incoherent with traditional literary studies, on the contrary – it enables to create a fruitful dialogue between these approaches. This is also testified by the quantitative analysis of the key poem of Slovak Romanticism, Andrej Sládkovič’s (1820 – 1872) Marína (1846). The essay discusses the results of the collective efforts employing quantitative methods to the research of Sládkovič’s work. It concludes that the authors of Love in Numbers were able to put statistical methods and recent advancements in the field into a dialogue with philosophy of technology and that their publication benefited from the fruitful interdisciplinary character of their work.

17

Authors: Viliam Nádaskay

The article offers an interpretation of Malé veľké mesto ([Little big city] 2008), the third book of poetry/long poem by the contemporary Slovak poet and writer Katarína Kucbelová (1979), the author of four books of poetry and a novella. From the point of view of poetics, Malé veľké mesto is a transitional text, a breaking point in the development of the author’s style. The book embodies a change towards a more concrete way of expression and contains topics, motives and language typical of Kucbelová’s later works. The article tackles two mutually intertwined aspects of the poem – the city and the subject. The central principle of the poem is the projection of the subject into the time and space. The city (specified as Bratislava) can be analysed from the point of view of urban studies as outlined by Olivier Mongin – through his theses on the urban situation and various forms of flows in the city and the creation of bonds with it. The issue of identity that is intimately connected with the city is read on the background of various forms the speaking subject in Katarína Kucbelová’s poetry takes. In her early work, the subject focuses on biological and physical traits, later she moves onto the analysis of her individualised experience complex and, finally, in her fourth book of poetry Vie, čo urobí ([He knows what he will do] 2012), the subject turns her attention to the society. A discussion of Malé veľké mesto illustrates the gradual abandonment of the fragmented (non)subject bearing traces of postmodernist subjectivity and a move towards a more decisive delineation of the boundaries of an individual.