Nerudova povídka Franc: romantizující kontexty realistické črty

Author(s): Dalibor Tureček / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2018

The study deals with Franc, a short story written by Jan Neruda. The literary text was published in the journal Lumír (1861) and then as a part of the book Arabesky (1864). In the context of Czech literary history, it represents the realistic and autobiographical modes of writing. At the same time, though, the plot and the same key themes of this short story follow the romantic tradition of the first half of the 19th century which can be found in both Czech and German literature.

Historie letí nad lomenicemi. K zapomenuté povídkové knize Mirka Elpla

Author(s): Ester Nováková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2014

The study analyses a collection of seven historical short-stories by Mirek Elpl Tři zlaté poháry (Three Gold Goblets; 1940). It tries to describe the collection’s subject matter and valid actualisation aspects, and accentuate the timelessness of its testimony (achieved mainly by focusing on the inner worlds of the fictional characters and their psychology). The study also addresses the dominant motifs of the work and its formal aspects, paying special attention to the lyrical and dramatic dimensions of the texts. In tales situated in from the history of the royal town of Ivančice, taking place between the 14th and 18th centuries, Mirek Elpl demonstrates a great poetic insight into past times and his ability to convey literary settings in a suggestive manner. His unrightfully forgotten short-story collection represents the most artistically valuable branch of historical fiction written in the period of the Second World War – combining lyrical prose with psychological insight.

Tylova povídka Ze života chudých v průsečíku soudobých podob literárnosti

Author(s): Zuzana Urválková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2014

The study focuses on the interpretation and also contemporary as well as later literary historical reception of J. K. Tyl’s short story From the Life of the Poor (Christmas Eve). The author of the study questions the marxist intepretations which consider the short story the first social short story with obviously realist aims – the autor disputes that the story is dominated by features of biedermeier, nor by realism.

Nerudova cesta na Blízký Východ (realita putování)

Author(s): Danuše Kšicová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2012

The study is devoted to the circumstances under which the pilgrimage of Jan Neruda was realised and the reality described in his Pictures from Abroad. The author analyzes the system of the narratological aspects of Neruda’s travel causeries and the semantic components of his short stories Various People, directly related to his travel causeries. The analysis of the poetics of Neruda’s travel sketches allows us to include them in the genealogy of this genre from H. Heine to Karel Čapek.

Prozaická tvorba Františka Khola v souvislostech české povídkové produkce po roce 1910

Author(s): Eva Štědroňová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2012

The article focuses on the prosaic works of František Khol, an almost forgotten author who made his literary debut together with the artists of the Čapek generation. It examines Khol’s belles lettres in the context of Czech short story production after 1910. For comparison, the author of the study employs two literary concepts of the period – neo-classicism, with which Khol’s prose is traditionally associated (he is often referred to as a grower of neoclassical short stories), and the invigorated realism of Otakar Theer. What the author drew upon in her comparison is above all a set of certain elements of popular fiction epic models. The article contains analyses of prosaic texts studied from the perspective of narrative practices; attention is also paid to issues of genre classification, and a significant part of the interpretation deals with the component of motif and theme. An analysis of Khol’s process of narration illustrates his more or less classical narrative concept, which differs from the experimental works of the Čapek brothers, or R. Weiner and F. Langer. That is why his inclusion in the context of searching neo-classicism is rather controversial. Unlike the above mentioned authors, with whom he is often listed in the same literary and historical context, Khol did not follow the path of ductile experiments, and of transformation of classical narration of model prosaic texts with philosophical overtones. Already in the early days of his work, he formed a fairly clear idea about his prose form. Primarily, his prosaic form was purposefully designed, with a tight composition, based on the storyline, with which characters, free from the psychological complexity and analyticity, create synthetic unity. He retained this form of writing throughout his writing life.

Návodná literatura v tvorbě Ivony Březinové

Author(s): Milena Šubrtová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1-2/2009

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Czech literature for children and young adults has been witnessing the development of the instructive (auxiliary) literature. This kind of literature, which appeared abroad in the 1960s, may be characterized as “the literature of questions and answers”, i.e. literature motivating children to consider the given topic – mostly an ethical one – and giving them, at the same time, an answer in the form of an instruction. In Czech literature for children and youth, Ivona Březinová (1964) may be considered as an innovator in this genre. Her literary production is exclusively related to children and youth. Instructive literature appears as a special genre, invariant in her production, both in author’s fairy-tales, realistic stories from children’s lives and proses with a girl as the main character. As an experienced author, she focuses on certain problems, such as drug addiction, gambling, and mental anorexia or Alzheimer disease. Her primary aim is to arouse the readers’ interest in these problems, to inform them and influence their education.

Kognitivní a percepční perspektiva ve vybraných prózách Jana Nerudy a Jakuba Arbesa a jejich funkční korelace

Author(s): Richard Změlík / Language(s): Czech Issue: 4/2020

The present work focuses on two types of narrative perspective — cognitive and perceptual. The cognitive perspective is understood to comprise the ways in which the fictional world can be mentally conceptualized from the standpoint of the characters, or such a perspective is a manifestation of collective opinion, which of course is not the subject of this work. The perceptual perspective is understood to comprise sensual perception, through which the phenomena or events of the fictional world are filtered. Based on Wolf Schmid’s conceptualization, we distinguish two basic aspects of narrative perspective, the first being the way evens are perceived or understood, while the second is the way they are represented and realized within the narrative. Another essential feature is the function of both perspectives, which manifests itself not only in terms of what is filtered by these perspectives and what is reflected in the semantics but also reciprocally. It is then our primary task to follow the way both perspectives functionally determine each other. We perform an analysis of this phenomenon on the corpus of Jan Neruda’s and Jakub Arbes’s prose works, which were written at around the same time. Firstly we show how the identified types of perspective are realized in the prose works of both authors, who each represent a differing realist school in Czech literature. We then focus on their functional correlations and find that Neruda’s prose work is characterized more by situations in which a cognitive perspective on a rationally modal basis determines the perceptual perspective, so that sense perceptions or illusions are corrected by the rational cognitive framework, whereas in the case of Arbes’s prose works under review, the reverse is for the most part the case. The typologically different functional correlation method of both perspectives is manifested in the sphere of diegesis, narrative strategy and composition, as well as in the conception of the fictional time-space, for example. Just as the usage of the perspective type or of the functional correlations does not necessarily determine the narrative composition, nor does it necessarily relate to the overall general orientation of the work on the Romanticism-Realism axis. However, its individual segments (setting and characters) determined by the functional polarity of both perspectives may refer to one of these literary mainstreams of the period.

O konstruktivistce a esencialistovi

Author(s): Jiří Jelínek / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3/2021

This paper aims to show how two contemporary Czech postmodern writers deal with the fictional renarration of the Libuše myth. Pole a palisáda (The Field and the Palisade, 2006) by Miloš Urban brings forth a traditional conception of the story of the princess who found herself a husband; however, the novella also uses some present-day writing techniques. Vilma Kadlečková wrote her story O snovačce a přemyslovi (The Weaver and the Premeditator, 2007 and 2015) as an answer to Urban’s adaptation and offers a completely different approach, setting the story in the near future and reversing many of its elements. Whereas Urban’s text is essentialist in nature, using ideas such as the rigid positions of the genders and an anthropocentric view of nature as its cornerstones, Kadlečková presents a work of fiction rooted in the postmodern and poststructuralist notion of social constructivism — her novella works with the idea of reality being shaped by what society believes in.

Preferované rodinné vztahy a jejich nesamozřejmost v prózách Jana Balabána

Author(s): Martin Markoš / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3/2021

This paper deals with the prose works of Jan Balabán. It focuses mainly on the contradictions between idealized notions of the family and relationships within it and the “reality” of the fictional world, which does not match these ideas.The methodological contribution is based on anthropological literature, mainly regarding Wolfgang Iser’s idea (literature as a medium which facilitates anthropological experience that is otherwise unattainable), but also considers the sociological theories of Zygmunt Bauman involving liquid modernity and the fixed and pure relationships of Anthony Giddens.At first glance, it would appear that Balabán’s work presents the reader with an ideal which one should strive to achieve. Upon closer inspection, however, it can be stated that Balabán is never truly literal, and that he immediately questions every path towards reconciliation. He does not offer us the ideal as an illusion, but rather the relationship of the ideal with the non-ideal, which the constant self-reflection and questioning of the characters suggest. The characters experience the incompleteness of the experienced reality of the world, and they attempt to face it via language practice and ritualized actions. These, however, more or less create the given reality.Balabán utilizes family structure and its history as a system. The relationship towards this system needs constant renewal and reinterpretation. This can, however, temporarily lead to anxiety and frustration, but repeated integration into the structure is possible, according to the prose under review, even if only temporarily.

Poctivý a potřebný návrat k Hálkovi

Author(s): Ivo Říha / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3/2021

Proměny díla Růženy Svobodové na přelomu století

Author(s): Radek Touš / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2022

Předložená studie se zabývá prozaickým dílem Růženy Svobodové z přelomu století. Romány Zamotaná vlákna (1899), Milenky (1902) a sbírku povídek Pěšinkami srdce (1902) nahlíží jako estetické jevy, jejichž prostřednictvím je možné do určité míry re/konstruovat dobovou literární rozpravu, její tendence a proměny. Výkladem těchto románů a povídek na pozadí poznatků o autorčině raném díle, jakož i srovnáním jejich časopiseckých a knižních verzí usilujeme o podchycení nových obsahových i tvárných rysů, které jsou v podstatě projevem pohybů v literárním poli. Abychom těmto proměnám co nejlépe porozuměli, zasazujeme je do širších společensko-kulturních souvislostí, jak je reflektovala dobová literární kritika. Domníváme se, že konfrontací próz Růženy Svobodové s recenzemi, kritickými statěmi, ale i díly dalších prozaiků je možné získat podklad k formulaci obecnějších závěrů, platných pro modernistickou prózu jako takovou.

Bajka pro dnešek

Author(s): Tereza Dědinová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2022

Ekokritika je relativně nový, nicméně významný a bouřlivě se rozvíjející směr zkoumání uměleckých děl zaměřující se na vztah literatury a životního prostředí. Od svého počátečního soustředění na nebeletristická líčení přírody (tzv. nature writing) ve své druhé generaci rozšířila pozornost ke všem typům reprezentace prostředí v literatuře a v médiích obecně. Daleka toho být čistě hodnotící či dokonce ideologickou metodou, ekokritika zkoumá reprezentace vztahu přírody a kultury, reflektuje propojení environmentální a sociální tematiky a analyzuje inovativní strategie narace usilující o postižení komplexních témat. V této studii se po úvodní charakteristice a přiblížení vývoje ekokritiky zaměříme na sedm současných českých románů tematizujících environmentální témata. Analýzu vybraných aspektů těchto děl — reflexe klimatické změny a environmentální krize, ekologické spravedlnosti a socio-environmentální bídy, reprezentace přírody a zpochybnění hranic mezi kulturou a přírodou — doplníme pokusem o jejich uchopení prostřednictvím konceptu hyperobjektu Timothy Mortona.

Životopis

Author(s): Katja Lange-Müller / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 05+06/2005

Short story written by Katja Lange-Müller: “Životopis”.

Zelene čarape

Author(s): Irena Vrkljan / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 07+08/2005

Excerpt from the novel written by Irena Vrkljan.

To malo pijeska na dlanu

Author(s): Marinko Koščec / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 07+08/2005

Short story written by Marinko Koščec: “To malo pijeska na dlanu”.

Novi doživljaji Elene Prekrasne

Author(s): Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 07+08/2005

Short story written by Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya: "Novi doživljaji Elene Prekrasne".

Nevidljiva prašina

Author(s): Drago Jančar / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 07+08/2005

Short story written by Drago Jančar: "Nevidljiva prašina".

Tri pesme i jedna priča

Author(s): Marin Katunarić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 07+08/2005

Poetry written by Marin Katunarić: “BALKANSKA VRTEŠKA”, “BALKAN-NOSTALGIJA”, “KRAVE” & short story “TOTALNO GLUPA PRIČA”.

Tko je, tko je Biljana Najzer?

Author(s): Irena Lukšić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 09+12/2005

Short story written by Irena Lukšić: "Tko je, tko je Biljana Najzer?"

Az ejtőernyős; Ennél több kell

Author(s): Edina Metz / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 850/2022

Short stories written by Metz Edina.