Paměť domu v žánru rodinné ságy
Memories of the house in the family saga genre

Summary/Abstract: This study is based on the theoretical assumptions of memory studies and aims to ascertain the extent to which individual memory may be influenced by literature and the mechanisms involved. In particular it focuses on the universal experience of individual memory, i.e. family memory. It deals with the potential ways in which this type of memory is formed by literature, and to be specific, by the family saga genre, which in the present research is represented by the most notable European and Czech texts of this kind, i.e. John Galsworthy’s Forsyth Saga; Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks; Roger Martin du Gard’s The Thibaults; Georges Duhamel’s The Pasquier Chronicles; Virginia Woolfe’s The Years; Jan Vrba’s Soumrak Hadlasuc rodu (Twilight of the Hadlasuc Family); Helena Dvořáková’s Pád rodiny Bryknarů (Fall of the Bryknar Family) andVladimír Neff’s pentalogy Sňatky z rozumu (Marriages of Reason). This study analyses the topos of the house within these texts, representing the central location for the formation of the family environment and the family memory, basing itself on Bachelard’s poetics of the literary space and focusing on two kinds of ideas: houses of the past and houses of the future. Bachelard contends that the house may be depicted in both the memory and in literature as a stable space, an anchor for childhood, or as a place for dynamic transformations associated with the realization of the future home project. Deliberations over the space of the house as examined in literary works are compared in the conclusion of this study with family members’ memories within the framework of oral history research. However, this analysis indicates that the family saga did not by any means exemplify archetypal ideas of the house of the past and the future as described by Bachelard. Likewise research into the memory of present-day families indicates that the archetype of the house is exemplified by somewhat different images. The location for the family memory is not the house, but any space in which family members meet, so the spotlight shifts from the location to the family relations.

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