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Drawing on the considerations of Karlheinz Stierle, who claims that one of the key tasks in thinking about literature is to oppose the technical totality of modernity and its repressive mechanisms with the substantiality of the slow and the already past, this study aims — in the reading of Franz Kafka, for example, by German thinker, literary theorist and critic Walter Benjamin, and that of Karel Čapek by Czech literary historian and critic Jiří Opelík — to present a form of thinking about literature and its studies that would belong in some ways to the ‘slow reading culture’. At a time when the predominant view of the status of the discipline has grown skeptical, when one has come to doubt the meaning of literature, it is useful to return to the sources and principal questions that comprise our basic attitude towards literature and its study. The question of the current state of thought about literature is reflected here by the prism of slowness and the culture of slow reading, together with a study of literature that opens our way to something we might have otherwise abandoned in the ‘rhythm of constantly renewed acceleration’. The first part of the study, dedicated to Benjamin’s reading of Kafka, focuses on several motifs, grouped around the idea of study and the idea of the image. He develops his interpretation of Kafka’s short stories, The New Advocate, and his reading of the photographic portrait of little Kafka, by reflecting on Benjamin’s tendency to introduce the subject in a circular manner, and through a method of interpretation that gradually approaches, interrupts and postpones, the methodological equivalent to slow reading, revolves around the conviction that the center of the thinking about literature is the understanding of literary works, his open movement, which can never reach a culminating understanding. The second part of the study, devoted to Opelík’s reading of Karel Čapek, deals with the philological footprint and philological impulse in the literary-historical works of Jiří Opelík: at the epicenter of literary research he inserts the poetic word, which like the history of his stratification is also a model of the historicity of understanding and the experience of time slowing down. Slowness, in the context of Opelík’s Čapek, receives numerous synonyms, some immediately implied (continuity and stability), others emerging from his Čapek reading spontaneously (service), and still others seeming to suggest themselves: loyalty. Loyalty to the author, a service rendered not only to him but also to the readers, to ongoing research, to the constancy of the contemporary reader’s interest. Opelíkʼs methods remain an element of confidentiality in relation to the studied work, which is both first and last instance of understanding, confidentiality based on the slow experience of reading.
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On the occasion of the second edition of Jiří Opelík’s first monograph of Josef Čapek (1980, 2017), this article traces its original context and outlines its significance for Czech literary historiography of the modernist movement: the limits of its contemporary reception contrasting with its massive later impact on literary scholarship, the context of the monograph series published by the Melantrich house (1961–1995), the links with the art historical debates concerning the art nouveau style and the art of the fin de siècle, the situation of literary criticism in the 1970s both in the communist Czechoslovakia and abroad, and, finally, the context of Jiří Opelík’s long term engagement with the works of the Čapek brothers and Josef Čapek in particular.
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The topic of our deliberation is resonance as an issue of understanding ourselves and the world, — an understanding that is undoubtedly related to speech. Resonance, as an issue, opened by senses in the world; an issue opening for senses and in the world; resonance as a matter of senses, whose sensorium commune is the body: becoming of the body (the body-becoming), therefore always a question of identity and difference (identifying and identified, marking and marked, differentiating and differentiated). The subject of our deliberation is the undulation that shapes cannot be represented by the shape of the wave or by the sum of individual shapes of the waves (any confirmation, reassuring of My-self in a shape or by a shape is always seriously threatened by the disintegration of Me). So, if Eastern thought says “the shape is empty”, besides the philosopher of being and existence, besides the phenomenologist, besides the metaphysician, besides the philosopher of the body, besides the philosopher of significance, in our reflection we also recognize the philosopher of emptiness.
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The article examines the prosaic works of Ladislav Dvořák (1920–1983), specifically the collection of short stories entitled Šavle meče. It analyses the construction of Dvořák’s texts with regard to their significant aspect, the connection between reality and the world depicted in the narrative. It argues against the approach that take the stories as a source for study of the author’s biography and reverse the relation, thus the author’s life is merely a basic material for constructing the literary universe. The analysis is based on the theories of Přemysl Blažíček and Milan Jankovič, who treat the specifics of creating meaning in literature. With the help of the concept of ‘objectivity’, adapted for literary interpretation, the role of facts, description and narrator in the text is explored. The study concludes that the meaning in the short stories of Ladislav Dvořák is created mainly by situatedness of the narrator, whose goal is to mediate his own life experience in the process of its formation and its indefiniteness.
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One of the most significant changes in the manner of reproduction, distribution, usage and interpretation of Czech Rorate chants took place in the 1830s and 1840s. It was then that Czech catholic priest Václav Michael Pešina (1782–1859) provided an interpretation of early modern Czech utraquist liturgical Rorate chants (which were newly available in the edition published in 1823 by Jan Hostivít Pospíšil) as Charles-Ernest Rorate, i.e. as old Czech chants of an advent worship for people, which, according to Pešina, were introduced into St. Vitus Cathedral and other Czech churches by Archbishop Ernest of Pardubice with the support of Charles IV. Pešina also put into effect new ways in which Czech Rorate chants were reproduced and distributed, and initiated their introduction into Czech catholic churches, including the Prague cathedral, as revived Old Czech morning advent catholic worship for the people. In this paper, we analyze the strategies which were used to assert the interpretation of Czech Rorate chants, such as the Charles-Ernest Rorate, in the Czech cultural domain, as well as the strategies which led to the Rorate from the year 1823 being determined as the primary source. We also focus on the demystifying processes which resulted in the rejection of the concept of the Charles-Ernest Rorate, and in the virtually complete erasure of Pešina’s person from the Czech collective memory. Attention is also paid to the identity- and culture-forming function of this Revivalist mystification and its potential to become a valuable analytic tool for the modern-day Czech society.
More...Mieke Bal — Catherine Belsey — Klaus Birnstiel — Moritz Csáky — Jonathan Culler — Bernard Franco — Stephen Greenblatt — Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht — Jean-Marc Hovasse — Fredric Jameson — Amália Kerekes — Alice Stašková — Vasilij Ščukin
Interview
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