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Claudio Leonardi (ed.): Středověká latinská literatura (6.–15. století). Příručka. Praha, Academia 2014. 502 stran.
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Holý Jiří, Conventions of Radka Denemarková’s Novel Peníze od Hitlera (Money from Hitler) along with its Reception. “Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne” 12. Poznań 2017. Publishing House of the Poznań Society for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences, pp. 371–379. ISSN 2084-3011. Radka Denemarková’s Peníze od Hitlera (Money from Hitler), edited in 2006, is a succesful novel. It has been perceived by critics as a significant work and traslated into ten languages. Despite this positive response, it is my belief that the novel is not an outstanding work. The construction of the text is full of stereotypes. It uses well-worn narrative procedures, conventional images and symbols as well as banal metaphors. That is why the credibility of the characters and situations presented in Peníze od Hitlera disappears very often. There is also a preexisting model of this novel, the play Der Besuch der alten Dame (1956, The Visit of the Old Lady), written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Unlike Dürrenmat, Denemarková emphasizes the dark scenes and the melodramatic emotionality of her novel. Therefore, her work is close to conventional clichés.
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This article deals with Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015) and the current debate on the lyric. When Culler’s book was published, it became the subject of much debate, as testified by reviews in American and European specialist journals. In some respects Culler’s theory differs substantially from most accepted ideas — particularly in its downplaying of the notion of the lyrical subject, its emphasis on poetics as opposed to hermeneutics and its rejection of fictiveness as a constitutive feature of the lyric. The first part summarizes the starting points and thebasic points made by Culler’s book; the second part presents a critical analysis of several of its concepts as well as the associations with other authors.
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This article deals with humanism in Jáchym Topol’s novel Gargling with Tar (Kloktat dehet, Prague, 2005). The Czech writer’s perspective is close to the concepts of German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who claims that the Romans were not only the authors of the idea of humanitas but also the inventors of bloody games such as circuses. In Topol’s novel, the circus is a holistic political project. The novel refers to the ideas developed in Russia in the 1920s, when a large number of circus theories and artistic manifestos were formulated. The circus was then officially recognised as the most important form of social entertainment (together with cinema) and it gained religious, aesthetic and political functions. By using the grotesque, fantasy and parody (Czechoslovakia as a giant circus), Topol’s novel creates an alternative narrative about the Prague Spring and “normalisation”. New meanings for notions such as progress, revolution and community are also revealed.
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The intellectual and civilizational achievements of the Czech National Revival in the nineteenth century produced many outstanding reference works (e.g. Riegrùv slovník nauèný and Ottùv slovník nauèný). Today these dictionaries are a rich and valuable source of general knowledge, as well as an „invaluable chronicle”– a document of that era. Between 1918 and 1945 a few interesting and significant lexicons (universal encyclopaedias) appeared on the Czechoslovak book market, including the continuation of the Jan Ottoproject (Ottùv slovník nauèný nové doby. Dodatky). In this article the author reviews the Czech and Czechoslovak reference works from this period and describes them in a general manner, paying attention tothe historical context of their creation and their specific features and qualities.
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In Czech cultural tradition the heroic paradigm based on respecting the imperative of sacrifice lives for the homeland is often replaced by different identity patterns in which patriotism is not the matter of „great” and spectacular gestures but it is manifested itself through daily routine and the idea of the organic work. The heroes of this work are mostly writers, journalists, scientists or – sometimes – businessmen, but it is hard to find among them soldiers and insurgents fighting for ideals in heroic way. This situation, which some poets and prose writers (f. e. Viktor Dyk or Julius Zeyer) consider as a disadvantage, is comprehensively shown in famous novel of Josef Škvorecký Cowards.
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Dalibor Dobiáš et al.: Rukopisy královédvorský a zelenohorský a česká věda (1817–1885). Praha, Academia 2014. 934 strany.
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Danielle Fuller — DeNel Rehberg Sedo: Reading Beyond the Book. The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. New York/London, Routledge/ Taylor & Francis Group 2013. 349 stran.
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K překladu studie „Co jsou to dějiny samizdatu?“
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After a walkthrough of theories on the main accomplishment provided by literature, the article qualifies its main statement that semantic “linking” of the pragmatically unlinked is its fundamental function. Thereupon the question arises, which stance knowledge takes in the face of this literary linking. Since knowledge can also have the meaning of connecting data, there should be determined a difference between rational and literary linking. According to Jakobson and the structuralist theories based on his teachings, literature links associatively, while knowledge links causally. According to the philosophical tradition, however, knowledge needs all four types of linking which Schopenhauer has specified: associations, causality, finality, and logics. The article extends this to literature – it needs all four functions as well: associations to create equivalences, causality to create plot, finality to create point of view and logics to create the verbal strata of the text. It is futile to try to base the literary types of linking on the epistemic types, or vice versa. Rather, we should find the switch between them. Linking provided by knowledge tries to avoid ambiguity, while literary linking strives for it. This can be explained as follows: knowledge wants to semantically control objects, while literature wants to understand ambivalent semantic relationships. The functional juxtaposition between epistemological and relational functions is represented by different symbols in Karel Čapek’s tale “Mirroring” – the fisher without a worm, the paradigm of mirrored objects passing by, the paradox of the moving and still river and the mysterious frizzles on the water.
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Big cities with their ethnically mixed populations have always been a playground for the development of human characters. This paper presents Prague as a stage, on which episodes from the lives of literary figures of two Slavic authors are acted out. The Czech Jaroslav Hašek and the Bulgarian Aleko Konstantinov were socially and politically engaged and expressed their ideological and political positions through their (anti)heroes. They deliberately ignored the cultural traditions, the history and the sights of the city in order to focus, with satirical power, on the life philosophy of the ‘little’ people suffering injustices. The big city typifies and individualizes the presented characters and plays a role in the action.
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David L. Hoover — Jonathan Culpeper — Kieran O’Halloran: Digital Literary Studies — Corpus Approaches to Poetry, Prose, and Drama. New York/ London, Routledge 2014. 202 strany.
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David Skalický: Ozvláštnění — fikce — estetická zkušenost. České Budějovice, Halama 2017. 126 stran.
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The Amtliche Schriften (Office Writings) of Franz Kafka, published in 2004, are regarded by the editor Benno Wagner as “a record of current and social problems” (WAGNER 2008: 93), in whose literary presentation a specific aesthetic form can be found. Wagner’s approach contributes both to the current debate on regionalism and provincialism, in that he opens up a discursive space for the social, in particular through the inclusion of the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. In this paper I will show to what extent this discursive space is productive for considering the “border” and the region as a whole, and the north Bohemian border region in particular.
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Kischs "Der Fall des Generalstabschefs Redl" und die Reportage der Neuen Sachlichkeit
Der Spionagefall des Oberst Redl war einer der großen Skandale am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges. Der Beitrag untersucht die literarische Bearbeitung der historischen Ereignisse in Egon Erwin Kischs "Der Fall des Generalstabschefs Redl" (1924) und entwickelt zwei Thesen: Erstens soll gezeigt werden, dass Kischs Fiktionalisierung dieser Reportage einer neusachlichen Poetik nicht etwa entgegensteht, sondern im Gegenteil für die Neue Sachlichkeit programmatisch ist. Zweitens soll der Nachweis erbracht werden, dass der Text ein Dokument für die Genese einer Überwachungsgesellschaft ist, in der die Kontrolle über die Kommunikationsmedien zum kriegsentscheidenden Faktor wird.
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In the article “The Rejection of the Metaphor. Thoughts on the Kafkian Style” we argue that the simplicity of the Praguean writer’s style and the purposeful avoidance of metaphor are based on the conviction that reality is one, indivisible and uninterpretable, and that literature should express this reality. For Kafka, metaphor is not a way to reveal the essence of reality, but a trap that alienates the writer from the essence of things. By trying to find the limits of the correspondence between literature and reality and attempting to reach the utopia of the total correspondence between word and world, Kafka builds his own style, one characterized by great simplicity, clearness and concreteness, where metaphor is used parsimoniously.
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This article deals with the historical poetics of narrative (inter alia in line with the programme of “diachronic narratology”, which focuses on describing and analysing the development of narrative forms and devices). Attention is also focused on the techniques that are characteristic of realism, which is understood to be a discourse phenomenon in literary history (i.e. not as some timeless phenomenon) and primarily as the suppression of novel dialogicality resulting from the aesthetic norms of 19th century realism. In line with Mikhail Bakhtin and Patricia Waugh’s theories, dialogicality is presented as a trend that is typical of the novel genre. Quite characteristic of the pre-realist novel is the conflict between the depicting (author’s) and the depicted (narrator’s) voice. The requirement for more realistic narration resulted in the suppression of this dual voice, i.e. in a trend towards the objectivization of narrative, which manages to conceal its literary nature and aim for the illusion of directly depicting reality. The objectivization of narration is based on Czech historical prose material (Linda, Klicpera, Tyl and Jirásek), in which the orientation towards a neutral perspective was made evident inter alia in the gradual elimination of narrative commentary, which had originally fulfilled both an interpretational and a formative (patriotic rhetoric) function. A similar phenomenon involving concealment of literariness also appears in personal narration, in which the fictional narrator progressively suppresses the originally evident authorial authority (obvious, for example, in the forewords to novels). Realist novels frequently mask themselves as authentic speech genres (with written or oral narration).
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The following study attempts to analyse an aspect of Czechoslovakian-German relations during the so called “Second Republic” (October 1938 — March 1939) that has until now stayed out of researchers’ interests, namely the entries in the so-called station chronicles. This almost unknown source provides us a specific point of view on the atmosphere of the given period because of its combination of institutional and personal characteristics. The most focused part are the weeks in autumn 1938, when Czechoslovakia was forced to withdraw large parts of its area to Germany which led to massive and simultaneously chaotic changes that the railway transport had to react on. Extraordinary efforts were requested in both personal and freight traffic. The aim of the study is to consider these entries as lieu de mémoire and to find answers on following questions: Is it possible to read about the feelings of the people in these entries, or are they written strictly objectively? How are the Germans described, as enemies with no hope for future, or as colleagues suffering under the same circumstances? For the purpose of the study, chronicles both from border and inland regions have been used to detect eventual differences that might be compared as well.
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The Hlučín region is today part of the Czech Republic and has been shaped by its intercultural past. For hundreds of years, linguistic and cultural minorities have lived here side by side, which is mirrored in the literary achievements of the population. Most information about the region’s literary life can be found in collections of oral traditions, in the literary works of writers originally from the Hlučín region, and in local German language Periodika.
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Dietrich Erben — Tobias Zervosen (edd.): Das eigene Leben als ästhetische Fiktion. Autobiographie und Professionsgeschichte. Bielefeld, transcript Verlag 2018. 370 stran.
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