INTERTEXTUALITY IN THE NOVEL ŠTEFICA CVEK IN THE JAWS OF LIFE

Abstract

Romantic love stories are among the most popular and wide spread commerce forms of literature; this genre unmistakably always provides the reader with the same delightful schematic experience: a love story between an ordinary girl and her “prince”; their story has a happy ending despite the “cruelty of fate”. Dubravka Ugrešić’s patchwork novel Štefica Cvek u raljama života (In the Jaws of Life) was a completely new way of tackling the genre when it became published in 1981. Today it is considered to be a classic book. It confronts us with trivial, naïve and dilettante story telling. The writer applying the props of intertextuality characteristic of postmodern literature, using elements from fairy tales and common examples from everyday life, accentuates the difference between popular literature and the so called high, sophisticated literature. The study focuses on these intertextual elements or fairy-tale characteristics, and tries to explain them.