The Dual Identity of Immigrants from the Southern Republics of the Former Yugoslavia in Sloveniain the Collection of Short Prose by Zoran Knezevic “Amphibians Die Twice” (2014)

Abstract

This paper focuses on the short prose collection “Amphibians die twice” (2014) by the Slovenian-Serbian writer Zoran Knežević (born in 1958 in Vojvodina and having migrated to Ljubljana in 1995), in particular on the author's attempts to express the dual identity of the immigrant protagonists, and their existence in the space between two cultures and languages. For this the writer applies to complex artistic images (among which are metaphors of “drill that drills in the stomach”, “ping-pong ball banging in the head”, “slaughtering a white kid”, “soybean fields”, etc.) that convey the doubled burden and pressure that his characters are under; the cinematic nature of the narrative, keeping the reader in constant tension, allows to reflect the high emotional intensity of the text. As toolkit for analyzing this phenomenon, we partially used theoretical studies of attitudes towards the other / alien in the works of representatives of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis.