The spatial and eco-aesthetic conception of gardens : examples from Tavčar's novelettes and short stories

Abstract

The article first presents Foucault's dual view of heterotopia and Böhme's understanding of the atmosphere in the context of the ecological aesthetics of nature, and later focuses on heterotopic gardens in Tavčar's short stories and novelettes and also observes them from the point of view of eco-criticism. Tavčar's emotional, sometimes impressionistically depicted gardens, which also refer to concrete locations, reflect the matrix of locus amoenus. They describe themselves as other spaces, most often in the role of romantic heterotopias, which means that they are not completely isolated from referential social spaces of the 19th-century realism, but, rather, they create relational ties with them, i.e., they reflect and undermine them.