The Novel of the Slovenian Canonical Writer Ivan Cankar as a Source of Intercultural Education in Schools on the Slovenian/Italian Border

The aim of the article is to present the novel Tujci/Foreigners by the Slovenian canonical writer Ivan Cankar as a special form of intercultural literature suitable as a source for intercultural education in schools on the Slovenian-Italian border. Cankar's novel Tujci is a story about a sculptor Pavle Slivar and other Slovenian artists in Vienna. In the novel, then, many kinds of alienation can be observed. We focus on the role that the sense of alienation of Slovenian artists in Vienna plays within Slivar's condition of exile. As in other later works, Cankar's vocabulary in this first novel is not very diverse; he uses the vocabulary of everyday language, which he reinforces by repeating individual words and placing them in new, unexpected contexts. In the novel Foreigners, Cankar treats the word 'tuj' (foreign, strange, unknown) and its various derivatives in this way. Through corpus analysis and language and discourse analysis, we have shown that these words acquire new, often metaphorical and symbolic meanings with repetition, so that Cankar's range of meanings in relation to foreignness and foreigner is very broad. Thus, we point to a method by which students in schools in the Slovenian-Italian border area can address issues of identity and acceptance or foreignness.