ŠVANTNER, HOROR, FANTASTIKA: ŽÁNROVÉ PARAMETRE

• Authors: Tomáš Horváth

Title variants

EN

Švantner, horror, fantasy: genre parameters

• Languages of publication: SK

Abstracts

EN

The analysis of the texts in the study seeks to prove the hypothesis that most of František Švantner´s short stories from the collection Malka (1942) belong to the genre of fantasy as it is defined by Tzvetan Todorov: the endings of the most stories leave the reader oscillating between the natural and supernatural interpretations of the plot. The epistemological status of numerous events in the story is ambivalent. Švantner´s texts generate the fantasy effect by means of motif focalisation: each hypothetically supernatural motif is focalised through a literary character´s perspective. The suyzhet must be reconstructed by a model reader in the text – this suyzhet is set in the crossing point of the different characters´ (contradictory) dialogue perspectives. Another method of generating the fantasy effect is a blank space in the text, a missing story syntagm (a data concealing approach) and the inversion of time coordinates, when e.g. the emergence of a character who was already dead at that time (which the reader does not learn until the end) allows the „psychic“ interpretation, too. Emphasising the genre dimensions of Švantner´s texts may also fulfil an important role in the literary life when translating these texts into a foreign literature: hypothetically, they could be introduced into a new literary context as a sample of a particular genre rather than as a sample of Slovak literature.

Keywords

EN

ŠVANTNER FRANTIŠEK; GENRE; FANTASY; HORROR; SLOVAK LITERATURE

• Publisher: Institute of Slovak Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slovenská literatúra (Slovak Literature)
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 59
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 122 – 138

Contributors

author

Tomáš Horváth

• Ústav slovenskej literatúry SAV, Konventná 13, 813 64 Bratislava, Slovak Republic