Žensko tijelo i trauma u romanima Milana Kundere
The Female Body and Trauma in Milan Kundera’s Novels

Summary/Abstract: The article examines the representation of female bodies in three novels by Milan Kundera: The Joke, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Besides exploring the ways in which female bodies are represented, the article focuses on traumatic experiences that shape the female characters’ relationship to their own bodies. Since the traumatic experiences are mostly related to male characters, the aim of the article is to point out that women most often perceive their own body through a man’s perspective. The article also seeks to explain how Kundera’s male characters’ personality becomes formed and shaped by the bodies of his heroines. In that sense, Kundera’s male heroes treat female bodies mainly as objects onto which they project their own desires and fantasies. Drawing on feminist approaches to literature, the article emphasises and points to the “burden” of the body in Kundera’s female characters.

• Details
• Contents