Souběžná míjení. Marxismus a zlom v pojetí literární „struktury“
Concurrent misses. Marxism and a watershed in the conception of literary “structure”

Summary/Abstract: This study focuses on a particular distinctive moment in the Czech and French history of literary thinking which took place in the latter half of the 1960s and which saw not only an encounter of Marxism and structuralism, but also a shift and radical change in the conception of literary structure. Marxist philosopher and historian Robert Kalivodapresents the development of Jan Mukařovský’s structural literary aesthetics from a Marxist and Freudian perspective ; according to him, Mukařovský’s conception matured — in association with the production and reflection of the interwar artistic avant-garde (Karel Teige) — towards a conception of aesthetic function and value as transparent anthropic principles and work of art as a dynamic ensemble of extra-aesthetic functions and values. Simultaneously, the representative of French Althusserian Marxism Pierre Macherey formulates his conception of literary output as a specific mode in the production of speech and literary structure as a space of difference, in which the ideological universalizations of the period are unconsciously presented in a critical light. Within the Czech structuralist tradition — and in harmony with its avant-garde pedigree — a parallel conception then emerges within the works of Oleg Sus and Milan Jankovič of literary structure as a structure that is unconsolidated and unconsolidatable, as the process and action of meaning, the movement of contradictions that will not have culminated in a final and completed synthesis. Analysis of the internal contexts and interrelations of these conceptions leads us to interpret them as the movement of concurrent misses — a radical change in the structure and the opening of its dialectics here has different resonances, caused by a different conception of the subject and the relationship between the work and the social structure — and also a failed meeting, whose connections have for the most part hitherto escaped the attention of literary studies and philosphy historians.

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