Jasmina ODOR (Independent scholar, Canada)
Contemporary short fiction:
A comparative glimpse of Croatian and Canadian literatures
The paper proposes to examine certain aspects of aesthetics, and of the reception, of
contemporary short fiction in the Canadian vs. the Croatian literary context. The paper will
briefly review the history of the short fiction form within the Canadian context (necessarily part
of a larger Western, English-language context), and the Croatian context (also necessarily part
of a larger context of South Slavic literature). Contemporary developments will be the bulk of
the paper, and here I will consider the practice of the form, looking for aesthetic and thematic
developments, and arguing that these developments are not ‘progressive’ (for example, from
conservatism of form to aesthetic experimentalism), but rather more varied and cyclical. In
Croatian literary short fiction of the last two decades or so, we find that strong formal
experimentalism marked the eighties, more so than in Canadian short fiction, which saw
experimentalism flourish in the sixties and seventies. In Croatia there was a short interruption in
literary production due to war and political changes in the nineties, but in the same decade we
saw a renewed interest in the short story, which was marked by current social themes, but also
by a strong strain of the fantastic, not as readily evident in the Canadian short story. The paper
will conclude with an examination of the current interaction of Canadian and Croatian short
fiction, in terms of reception and translation, and potential for mutual influence. The trend in
translation is at the moment strongly skewed; Croatian works in English translation, including
short fiction, are sparse on the Canadian market. On the other hand, the Croatian literary market
is saturated with translations of English works, although the Canadian literary short story is still
a marginalized genre within this trend.