Intelektuální protest proti masové produkci historických děl aneb Obsah a kontext znevažující (nejen) jednu knihu a jedno téma
An Intellectual Protest against the Mass Production of Works about History: Content and Context Which Detract from a Book and Its Subject Matter

Summary/Abstract: In the first part of this review article, the author critically considers mainstream Czech contemporary history writing as a whole. Apart from the missed opportunities to tackle potentially ‘big’ topics that might also be of interest to readers outside the Czech Republic – which unfortunately only a few individuals have devoted themselves to – he argues that historians’ being suspicious of, or ignoring, any kind of theoretical concept and profounder methodological consideration is a chronic malady of the field here. This weakness, according to him, is manifested both in a stubbornly one-sided orientation to primary sources (in the worst case merely ‘copying out archive records’), and, on the other hand, adopting current Western theoretical and methodological approaches and applying them mechanically to Czech historical material. The author then freely relates his theses to Přemysl Houda’s Intelektuální protest, nebo masová zábava? Folk jako společenský fenomén v době tzv. normalizace (Intellectual protest or mass entertainment? Folk music as a social phenomenon in the ‘Normalization’ period), published in 2014. The reviewer, however, does not aim to use this book as a prime example of these shortcomings – instead, it represents for him simply one publication of a whole range of comparable ones. Houda, argues the reviewer, has tackled the important and so far little-researched topic of Czech folk music in the 1970s and 1980s, but he too suffers from overly narrow specialization and from mistrust of theory, and he also partly neglects the relevant literature. The reviewer considers each chapter in the book, and points out the problems, for example, the author’s neglecting the continuity on the folk-music scene between the 1960s and the period of ‘Normalization’ (after the crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement), the lack of a defi nition of ‘folk music’, the excessively narrow selection of singer-songwriters he considers, the overly brief analysis of their lyrics, and insuffi cient attention to the essence of such a diverse genre and the transformations it went through. Better than in the book’s more general chapters, the author has, according to the reviewer, succeeded in the case studies devoted to particular folk-music phenomena. Though Houda’s book is on the whole an important stone in the mosaic of our knowledge, the reviewer concludes, it is far from a gem.

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