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As awareness of the pandemic nature of what the world faced in early 2020 took hold, several news media began to remind us of what they called the “forgotten flu”: the 1918 Spanish flu (Wilson 2020; Jenkins 2021; Prideaux 2021; Australia story 2020; McGarvey 2020). Simultaneously, scholars of American literature found themselves at odds with these headlines, for to the readers of the modern American fiction the 1918 Spanish flu was synonymous with Katherine Anne Porter’s novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider and was thus far from forgotten but rather indelibly memorialized. Even recent medical journals have referred to Pale Horse, Pale Rider in articles that attempt to put a human face on the experience of pandemic (Bristow 2010; Potter 2013; Spinney 2017). This paper seeks to contribute to that human face by considering Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider as an instance of (1) close recall of a buried moment of war-related and post-war catastrophe, and (2) a modernist experiment in gendered mindscape and trauma survival.

Kanadska pisateljica Alice Munro, mojstrica sodobne kratke proze in prejemnica Nobelove nagrade za književnost leta 2013, je pozornost literarnih kritikov v svoji domovini pritegnila že leta 1968 z objavo svoje prve zbirke kratkih zgodb. V dolgoletni pisateljski karieri je izdala štirinajst zbirk kratkih zgodb, za katere je prejela številne pomembne književne nagrade, med drugim leta 2009 mednarodno nagrado man booker za življenjsko delo. Številne njene zbirke so postale mednarodne prodajne uspešnice, v Sloveniji pa je bila popolnoma spregledana vse do leta 2003, ko je bila v slovenščino prevedena ena izmed njenih zgodb, šele leta 2010 pa sta bili v slovenščino v celoti prevedeni dve njeni zbirki. Potem ko je avtorica leta 2013 prejela Nobelovo nagrado, smo poslovenili še dve njeni zbirki. Osrednje vprašanje, na katerega želi odgovoriti disertacija, je, zakaj je bila Alice Munro v Sloveniji tako dolgo spregledana. Naša predpostavka je, da se razlogi za to skrivajo tako v specifikah njene pisave kot v posebnostih slovenskega kulturnega in literarnega prostora. Pisavo Alice Munro odlikujejo dovršen literarni slog, zapletene pripovedne tehnike, »regionalizem« in osveščenost glede ženskega vprašanja. Zaradi omenjenega je prenos njenih del v slovenski kulturni in literarni prostor problematičen, še posebej zaradi drugačnega razvoja zvrsti kratke zgodbe pri nas, drugačne tradicije ženske književnosti, ki je povezana z družbenopolitično preteklostjo tega prostora, ter zaradi posebnosti slovenske prevajalske in založniške politike, ki igrata pomembno vlogo pri odločanju o tem, kateri tuji avtorji bodo prevedeni v slovenščino. The Canadian author Alice Munro, master of the contemporary short story and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, received the attention of literary critics in her home country already in 1968, with the publication of her first short-story collection. In her longstanding career, she has published fourteen short story collections, among which many received important literary awards, including Man Booker International in 2009, and several became international best-sellers. However, she was completely overlooked in Slovenia until 2003, when one of her stories was translated into Slovene. It was not until 2010 that two of her collections finally appeared in Slovene, followed by two other by 2015. The issue that this thesis addresses is why Alice Munro was neglected in Slovenia for so long. Our main assumption is that the reasons for the neglect of her work lie in the specifics of her writing, as well as in the specifics of the Slovene cultural and literary space. Munro’s writing, which is characterized by complex writing aesthetics and narrative art, as well as by regionalism and the predilection for women’s issues, cannot be easily transferred into the Slovene environment, where the short-story genre as well as women’s writing have a different tradition, the latter being related to this area’s specific socio-political past. Another particularity of the Slovene literary and cultural space is its translation industry and publishing policy, which play a crucial role in deciding which foreign authors will be translated into Slovene.