Básník a lid

Poet and people

Author(s): Joseph Grim Feinberg / Language(s): Czech / Issue: 6/2017

This study attempts to reconstruct key elements in the thought of literary critic and folklorist Bedřich Václavek. Václavek is generally recognized as a prominent figure in interwar literary development and as a researcher who examined genres of popular tradition that had previously eluded scholarly attention. Yet his thought is not well known as a synthetic whole. The reception of his work is divided into two separate fields, and interpreters have paid little attention to the importance of his folkloristic work on his understanding of literature, and to the importance of his literary theory on his understanding of folklore. Václavek’s work as a whole remains little known. Nevertheless, Václavek dealt with parallel issues in his two main fields, elaborating complementary conceptual frameworks, each of which contributed to the originality of the other. If we view Václavek only as a literary critic, we may see him as a figure who voiced and confronted crucial challenges of his times, but who does not particularly stand out from among the many other critics of his day who made similar attempts to bridge the experimental literary ambitions of the avant-garde and the social objectives of those political movements that the avant-garde most frequently embraced. And if we view Václavek only as a folklorist, we may see him as a careful scholar who contributed to the development of his discipline, but who did not go beyond its boundaries to lay out the more general social importance of this work. It is only when we look at Václavek’s work in its entirety that we perceive the conceptual innovation he brought to literary criticism from folklore studies, as well as the social importance acquired by folklore studies when it is connected to the overall aesthetic expression of the people in society. What emerges from a synthetic reconstruction of Václavek’s thought is his systematic attempt to explain the concept of “people” and its role in aesthetic development, both in the literary sphere and in the sphere of oral tradition — and (perhaps even more importantly for Václavek) in the space between the written and the spoken word, where literature and folklore meet and general “culture” emerges from this fusion.

Błędny rycerz, pielgrzym, tułacz, Rom – powroty do tematów nomadycznych w literaturze czeskiej

Author(s): Anna Gawarecka / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 3/2017

The topics of pilgrimage, wandering or roam which were the main subject of the romantic anthropological ideas often returns in Czech literature. On the one hand these topics are included into the resources of universal motifs of the Western European culture, on the other hand they represents an important strand in the contemporary discussion on the modern conditio humana. The repetition of the nomadic topics, based on the advanced chain of the intertextual connections and assumed the preliminary understanding with the reader, who is knowledgeable in a world of the prearranged meanings and ways of representations of the figure of wanderer/pilgrim/ vagrant, is an argument of the long lasting field of imagination which is connected with this figure. It i also an suitable tool for the research of the journey as a symbol of human life.

Bóg złego Prawa. Próba gnostyckiej interpretacji Procesu Franza Kafki

Author(s): Krzysztof Brenskott / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2015

The goal of the article is a proposal to read the output of Franz Kafka through the prism of Gnostic beliefs and ideas. The author, having noticed a certain convergence between the Gnostic experience of existence and the vision of the world presented in the works of Kafka, tries to seek the convergences between the former and the latter. The point is not to prove that The Trial, or any other work by the writer, may be subject to a full, self-contained and comprehensive Gnostic interpretation, let alone that Kafka was a Gnostic. The author of the article only suggests a different way of looking at The Trial, as just another tool used to extract different senses and new meanings from the work. The sketch analyses Kafka’s novel, focusing, consequently, on the Gnostic anthropology, the vision of reality, the question of the Law, and the possibility of salvation. The adopted perspective enables new readings of Kafka’s work, and the interpretation, on the one hand, stresses the demiurgic nature of Kafka’s Law, and on the other hand, seems to be an optimistic reading through underlining the possibility and role of salvation.

Bohumil Fořt: Fikční světy české realistické prózy

Author(s): Martin Hrdina / Language(s): Czech / Issue: 1/2016

Bohumil Fořt: Fikční světy české realistické prózy. Praha, Filip Tomáš — Akropolis 2014. 204 strany.

Brückenbauer, Brückensprenger, Brückenreparateure. Anmerkungen zur Konzeption der deutsch-tschechischen Kulturvermittlung in Böhmen

Author(s): Štepán Zbytovský / Language(s): German / Issue: 01+02/2017

The pluricultural situation in Bohemia between 1900 and 1939 was articulated among others by intellectuals who, as translators, organizers and publicists, mediated in diverse constellations between linguistically, nationally, religiously, socially, politically and aesthetically different cultural complexes. This paper reflects on the possibilities of conceptually grasping this form of mediation between Czech and German culture – in relation to the frequent use of “bridge” metaphors in the context of this mediation, and in relation to today’s theoretical debates as well as statements from the time by Otokar Fischer, Otto Pick, Max Brod and Rudolf Fuchs.

Byla jednou jedna...

Author(s): Libor Martinek / Language(s): Czech / Issue: 3/2017

Can the dissident speak? The Czech woman writer in the work of Philip Roth and Dominik Tatarka

Author(s): Charles Sabatos / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2017

The Czech dissident movement that began in the late 1970s was a network in which women played a key role, but the Czech writers who gained fame in the West were invariably men. In Philip Roth’s 1985 novella The Prague Orgy, his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman meets a woman writer named Olga, whose pursuit of the American writer owes more to erotic fantasy than to the milieu Roth recreates in otherwise faithful detail. This portrayal of the Czech female as both sexualized and “other” can be traced back to twentieth century Prague-German writers,but Roth both politicizes and intellectualizes this archetype by making the desiring (rather than desired) woman a writer and dissident. A real-life perspective on the Czech disidentka (female dissident) appears in the work of Dominik Tatarka, one of the few Slovak writers tobe closely associated with the dissident movement. The last work Tatarka published in hislifetime was a memoir based on tape-recorded interviews with Eva Štolbová, who became Tatarka’s connection to Prague dissident circles. In 1988, these Navrávačky (Tapings) were published in edited book form in Germany, and it was not until more than a decade later that the full transcripts were published in Slovakia. While the female Czech dissident is eroticized in this text as well, Štolbová is not a mere object of desire; she portrays her side of the story inher own memoir, Lamento (1994). The gender dynamic between Štolbová and Tatarka subverts the cultural assumption in which the Czech language was constructed as “masculine”and Slovak as “feminine.” Thus both Roth and Tatarka illustrate the interplay between “otherness”and gender in the production of dissident culture, and its reception by domestic (both Czech and Slovak) as well as international readers.

Claudio Leonardi (ed.): Středověká latinská literatura (6.–15. století). Příručka

Author(s): Evina Steinová / Language(s): Czech / Issue: 3/2017

Claudio Leonardi (ed.): Středověká latinská literatura (6.–15. století). Příručka. Praha, Academia 2014. 502 stran.

Conventions of Radka Denemarková’s Novel Peníze od Hitlera (Money from Hitler) along with its Reception

Author(s): Jirí Holý / Language(s): English / Issue: 12/2017

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.

Cullerova Teorie a problémy lyriky

Author(s): Josef Hrdlicka / Language(s): Czech / Issue: 3/2018

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.

Cyrk jako parodia komunizmu. Powieść "Kloktat dehet" Jáchyma Topola

Author(s): Sylwia Siedlecka / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 14/2014

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.

Czeskie i czechosłowackie encyklopedie uniwersalne z lat 1918–1945

Author(s): Dariusz Tkaczewski / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2016

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.

Czy Czesi są narodem tchórzy? Josefa Škvoreckiego dyskusja z tradycją heroiczną

Author(s): Anna Gawarecka / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 4/2018

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.

Dalibor Dobiáš et al.: Rukopisy královédvorský a zelenohorský a česká věda (1817–1885)

Author(s): Dalibor Turecek / Language(s): Czech / Issue: 4/2016

Dalibor Dobiáš et al.: Rukopisy královédvorský a zelenohorský a česká věda (1817–1885). Praha, Academia 2014. 934 strany.

Danielle Fuller — DeNel Rehberg Sedo: Reading Beyond the Book. The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture

Author(s): Jirí Trávnícek / Language(s): Czech / Issue: 4/2015

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.

Darntonův model komunikační sítě a výzkum samizdatu

K překladu studie „Co jsou to dějiny samizdatu?“

Author(s): Gordon Johnston,Eduard Burget,Petra Loucová / Language(s): Czech / Issue: 6/2016

Das Gegenüber von literarischem und philosophischem Verknüpfen und seine Reflexe in Karel Čapeks Erzählung Odrazy

Author(s): Matthias Freise / Language(s): German / Issue: Sondernr./2018

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.

Das mannigfaltige Prag in Werken von Hašek und Konstantinov

Author(s): Antoaneta Mihailova,Kalina Minkova / Language(s): German / Issue: 01+02/2017

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.

David L. Hoover — Jonathan Culpeper — Kieran O’Halloran: Digital Literary Studies — Corpus Approaches to Poetry, Prose, and Drama

Author(s): Petr Plechác / Language(s): Czech / Issue: 6/2015

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.

David Skalický: Ozvláštnění — fikce — estetická zkušenost

Author(s): Josef Šebek / Language(s): Czech / Issue: 6/2018

David Skalický: Ozvláštnění — fikce — estetická zkušenost. České Budějovice, Halama 2017. 126 stran.