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Špirit, Michael. Textologie dnes: (příručka pro začínající editory). Vydání první. Praha: Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, v.v.i., 2019. 267 stran. Varianty; sv. 12. ISBN 978-80-88069-90-4.
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Špirit, Michael. Textologie dnes: (příručka pro začínající editory). Vydání první. Praha: Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, v.v.i., 2019. 267 stran. Varianty; sv. 12. ISBN 978-80-88069-90-4.
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Novák, Jan. Kundera: český život a doba. První vydání. Praha: Argo, 2020. 879 stran, 32 nečíslovaných stran obrazových příloh. ISBN 978-80-257-3215-1.
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Smyčka, Václav. Das Gedächtnis der Vertreibung: interkulturelle Perspektiven auf deutsche und tschechische Gegenwartsliteratur und Erinnerungskulturen. Bielefeld: Transcript, [2019], ©2019. 256 stran. Interkulturalität: Studien zu Sprache, Literatur und Gesellschaft; Band 15. ISBN 978-3-8376-4386-2.
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This paper contains following book review: Hradilová, Marta, ed., Jelínková, Andrea, ed. a Veselá, Lenka, ed. Paralelní existence: rukopisy a tisky v českých zemích raného novověku. Vydání první. Praha: Academia, 2020. 357 stran. Knižní kultura; svazek 2. ISBN 978-80-200-3128-0.
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The article explains the development and specific features of the detective genre in the Czech Republic (and its predecessor Czechoslovakia) from the beginning of the 20th century. It observes that these features are just as valid in the last 30 years. The main focus ison crime fiction literature and, in particular, TV crime series that have become especially popular since 2015, both of which have been inspired by true organised crime cases between 1990-2010.
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Various materials published in professional journals show us a picture of the professional life of a given group. Therefore, an attempt was made to reconstruct the image of ibrarianship in Czechoslovakia in 1945–1955 on the basis of the content published in two major periodicals: „Knihovna” and „Lidová Knihovna”. During this period, the functions of libraries and librarian were redefined. Convincing decision-makers about the role of books in building the socialist system resulted in attempts to involve librarians in propaganda activities.
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The article is an attempt to consider the common points in the prose of Polish and Czech female writers. It does not constitute a closed story being presented in a categorical tone of recognitions based off of the summary of a given oeuvre’s stage. It is rather a reflexion resulting from stipulations, probability, possible time points of contact and overlapping of these themes that are mainly oscillating around the recovery of one’s own voice as well as privacy and intimacy. As the result, these reflections can be treated as an attempt at pointing out a community of experiences characteristic for a given sex, which rejects the dominating discourse and which focuses on individual experience that is oftentimes difficult to express and is exposed to embarrassment and isolation. The Polish and Czech female writers presented in the narrative of this text are speaking with their own voices and moreover they are speaking for other women as well, having noticed the public and political dimension of privacy and intimacy.
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Both in the Polish as well as in the Czech literature after 1989, the number of family narrative increases, which – according to many researchers – might be successfully used to observe social transformations. This article undertakes such attempt in regard to two novels – Szopka [Farce] by Zośka Papużanka and Pod śniegiem [Under the Snow] by Petra Soukupová. They are analysed (plot- and language-wise) from the comparative perspective, moreover – in accordance with the opinions of Agnieszka Mrozik, Anna Pekaniec and Eva Klíčová – they are treated as a document pertaining to Polish and Czech realities as well as the difference in both nations’ mentalities. Described were also a different methods, by which both texts deconstruct myth of happy family as well as represent a broader sociocultural phenomena – the Polish Romantic tradition and the Czech escape from the public into a private sphere.
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Review of: Nie tylko Hašek i Szwejk? [Joanna Goszczyńska, Jaromír Kubíček, Tomáš Kubíček, Česká literatura v polských překladech 1989–2020 / Literatura czeska w tłumaczeniach polskich 1989–2020, tłum. Katarzyna Slowiková, Moravská Zemská Knihovna, Brno 2020, ss. 231]
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The fate of the German minority living in the Slavic countries before World War II has become the subject of numerous novels in recent years, not only those whose authors witnessed dramatic events that took place after the end of the war, but also young writers who only learned about the fate of marginalized groups after 1989. Thanks to literature, images of post-war history which until then had been a „blank spot”, started to circulate. The German inhabitants of Brno (Tučková) or Osijek (Šojat-Kuči) were for many years wiped from official memory, erased from historical studies, doomed to social exclusion, loss of their own language and identity. Interestingly, oblivion and erasure also encompass the city space where the characters of the analyzed novels once lived. Selected literary texts make it possible to trace how the image of memory is constructed and how it is manipulated.
More...Několik poznámek k teorii „zrcadla obzvláštního“ Vladimíra Boreckého
The article’s central theme is Vladimír Borecký’s “theory of the obscure,” which is viewed and interpreted from several points of view. Firstly, it is compared from the point of view of philosophical pragmatism, especially from the search for continuity overcoming the dualism of art and life. Secondly, the attention is focused on the dual character of mirroring in Borecký’s key concept. Subsequently, the network of standards, norms, and criteria that a rational critical debate about the meaning and value of the work of these extraordinary figures always presupposes is described. Finally, the author conceptualizes the nature of “strange works” in terms of one of the contemporary definitions of art, the American philosopher Alva Noë’s concept of artworks as “strange tools.”
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The famous English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy and the little-known Czech short story writer Josef K. Šlejhar share a similar position in literary history, both being frequently, and rather inaccurately, discussed in the context of European naturalism. Though being partly influenced by the same ideas as the French naturalists, they both developed an individual mode of representation, especially in the way they structure the space of their fiction. The present paper attempts to analyse their approach and to demonstrate the fundamental difference of their conceptions. The prevailing form of space in Hardy is structured landscape where the nodal points are loci characterized by specific semantic density determining the issues the major characters are confronted with. Contrary to this, Šlejhar’s conception tends to present space as an exteriorizing projection of his characters’ situation, very often representing a moral dilemma of an individual or a community; due to this his space is less structured but more intense, deriving its meaning from the character, while in Hardy the process is reverse. The principal focus of the paper is thus on the semantics of the interaction between character and its environment or circumambient space.
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This study tries to connect two replicas of Joseph Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Haruki Murakami’s “Samsa in Love” and Ian McEwan’s The Cockroach to their complex inspirational source through a number of features, insisting on the significance of the Samsa name as a possible derivative of the Hinduist Samsara, viewed as sufferance, death, rebirth as reincarnation. In this respect, the two contemporary stories may be reversal sequels to Kafka’s novella. The study analyses the sources of surrealist parodic humour and tragic nonsense in these pieces of fiction, their use of names and interpersonal relationships between the characters, the dialogues.
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The study deals with representations of colonialism in the travelogues by Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund. The main reason behind writing the text is the specific position of Czechoslovakia within the post-war colonial discourse and the fact that although Hanzelka a Zikmund are a famous pair of Czechoslovak travellers, such an analysis of their travelogues has not yet been carried out. The study aims to answer the question of how Hanzelka and Zikmund represented colonialism in their texts and what these representations say about them and the social environment from which they set out into the world. These representations are mostly associated with criticism of capitalism and were deployed to highlight the positive qualities of socialist regimes and to delineate the differences between the world of the so-called West and the world of the East. Today the label 'West' usually carries rather historically progressive connotations but Hanzelka and Zikmund tend to present quite the opposite, which creates an interesting difference between how they presented themselves outside their travelogues and what is recorded in their work. Indeed, the popularity of these authors in contemporary historical memory is linked, among other things, with their anti-communist attitudes and subsequent persecution (for example, the ban on publishing in their later years). The study also addresses the issue of the applicability of the concept of Orientalism to societies that were not direct participants in expansive colonial ventures.
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This paper contains following book review: Fumerton, Patricia, ed., Kosek, Pavel, ed. a Hanzelková, Marie. Czech broadside ballads as text, art, and song in popular culture, ca. 1600-1900. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, [2022], ©2022. 468 stran. ISBN 978-94-6372-155-4.
More...Joachim Hübner a jeho recenze první verze Komenského Velké didaktiky
Joachim Hübner, a prominent member of the intellectual circle centred around the London-based intelligencer Samuel Hartlib, was highly valued for his varied knowledge and served as a critic in the Hartlib circle. This paper focuses on his scathing review of the first version of Comenius’ Great Didactic, which he inserted in a letter sent to Comenius during November 1639. A Czech translation of Hübner’s critique and the apology he sent in his next letter is included.
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In 1925, St. K. Neumann’s magazine Reflektor published O Anně, rusé proletářce (On Anna, the Red Proletarian), a novel by the Czech author Ivan Olbracht. Its significance for Czechoslovak political literature of the interwar period is commonly compared to the role Fedor Gladkov’s Cement (1925) played in what was later institutionalised as Soviet socialist realism. However, because the label of socialist realism too quickly draws the reader’s attention to typical elements such as positive heroes and political messages, Anna seems to be difficult to approach without bias. Simultaneously, as the novel represents an evidently more straightforward version of literary activism than e. g. the literary avant‑ gardes, it can also be read as a testament to the gridlocked binarity of sexes and corresponding gender roles, as these were characteristic of both conservative circles and the new communist ethics that were imposed by the Comintern in the late 1920s. Together with these dichotomies, the novel testifies to a solidification of the unbridgeable gap between centre and periphery, capital and province. A careful look, however, reveals an interesting gender, spatial and class dynamic behind this reinforcement – a dynamic far more complex than both the label ‘socialist realism’ and the postmodern understanding of modern juxtapositions of genders seem to suggest.
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The aim of my study is to compare the views of the concept of literary history by Russian formalists and Prague structuralists, two signifi cant literary theoretical schools of the beginning of the twentieth century. In spite of the fact that both schools are primarily considered literary theoretical, their particular members were involved in a whole scale literary critical investigation – including the area of literary historical inquiry. Indeed, slowely but surely both respective schools became more emancipated in their claim of a general validity of their originally literary theoretical ideas and started to widen the scope of their scholarly interest towards encompassing the concept of literary history. The formalists originally almost dismissed literary history as an unwelcome heritage of the old approach and the structuralists overlooked it due to their initial emphasis on synchronic aspects of literature.
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František Kopečný wrote a study entitled “Podníceno Durychem. Příspěvek ke slovosledu a slohu české prózy” (Stimulated by Durych. A contribution to the research of word order and the style of Czech prose) for the samizdat anthology Jaroslavu Durychovi k sedmdesátým narozeninám 1956 (To Jaroslav Durych at the occasion of his seventieth birthday, 1956), arranged by Vladimír Justl, an editor and the student of Kopečný. The text has not been published anywhere else. In the study, Kopečný summarizes current findings concerning mutual relation between word order and semantic structure of utterances and he exemplifies them with the use of the quotes from Durych’s proses. He also points out certain identical features of artistic prose and colloquial speech.
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