A Sense of Feeling: The Example of the Gregors

Abstract

The paper focuses on the short story Maco Mlieč by Jozef Gregor Tajovský. It examines the author’s empathy toward the socially and personally conditioned problems of the world, as well as his poetics, that is the way of artistic articulation of the theme in the short story. The paper traces the shifts in interpretations of Maco Mlieč throughout the 20th century up to the most recent research by Marcela Mikulová. It draws attention to Mikulová’s ability to interpret previously overlooked elements of the short story, thus arriving at a significantly different and more complex interpretation. In conc-lusion, the paper discusses the didactic processing of Maco Mlieč in secondary school curricula, focusing on the possibilities that literary research proposes for the educational sphere.