A Literary Darwinian Comparison of Dominik Smole’s Antigone and Boris A. Novak’s Cassandra – Two Ways of Reconciliation

Abstract

Antigone by Dominik Smole is a literary text which gave rise to a question of the possibility of reconciliation in Slovenia. I understand reconciliation as the process of easing the social tension, the main consequence of which is the re-establishment of connections within a community or between individuals. The same question arises in relation to Cassandra by Boris A. Novak, although his play focuses on a different, personal aspect of reconciliation. Literary Darwinism and neurocognitive literary studies open up a theoretical possibility to understand individual and collective confrontation with difficulties in establishing and maintaining interpersonal relations, social cohesion, and the role of an individual in a community. It is on these theoretical foundations that I set up a literary Darwinian model of analysis for both plays, which I employ analyzing the bases of both heroines’ actions. On the other hand, by applying the proposed analytical model, we can better understand which cognitive mechanisms are at the bottom of the similarities between Antigone and Cassandra and why there are indelible differences and tensions between them.