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In 2020, a book of early proses by Richard Weiner was published under the title Přetržená nit a jiné rané prózy. In response to this publication we made an interpretation of selected texts focused on Weiner’s typical topics and motives. Our goals were to find specifics about this Weiner’s creative phase and try to make a reflection about question “How important are these early texts for author‘ s literary work as a whole.“
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Victorious Fall (1929) is the first novel by the Czech-born Slovak author Petr Jilemnický (1901–1949). The novel reflects the motives of "misery" and "beauty" of Kysuce. Literary historiography perceives novel in regard to Expressionism (J. Števček, 1983) and Lyricism (F. Miko, 1969; J. Števček, 1973). The paper points to the distinct metaphorical, imaginative nature and semantic ambiguity of the novel. Despite the criticisms of the DAV group, Peter Jilemnický was a member of the group, Victorious Fall features many stylistic and expressive principles related to the aesthetics of the Czech avantgarde program Poetism. The novel represents a contact between literary tradition and innovative stylistic techniques. The use of lyrical tendencies demonstrates the adoption of the poetic quality of Slovak literature in a response to the crisis of the prose in the first half of the 20. century. Victorious Fall proves the artistic pursuit of Peter Jilemnický for a new novel form.
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Václav Havel claims in his essays how important the structure of his play is. In this paper we will focus on the rhythm of Václav Havel's dramas as a crucial component of their structure and will analyze his plays, The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968) and Largo desolato (1984).
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Contemporary Czech writer Václav Vokolek is in his work inspired mostly by the world of literature, paintings and spiritual concepts, distancing his writing from any political and social reality. But he made one exception at the beginning of new millennium, in cooperation with Czech illustrator Jindřich Strašnov. Together they have created Nejsme jako my (2001), cycle of political satires with expressive illustrations, pointed against main characters of Czech post-revolutionary political scene. The aim of this contribution is to highlight this artistically-literary work, that sure has potential to speak to readers but has not got any responses or reviews ever since publishing.
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The topic of this study is the character of the false messiah – various aspects associated with the character are analysed in three contemporary Czech novels which to varying extent touch on the subgenre area of dystopia: Mondschein (2012) by Ondřej Štindl, Můj bratr Mesiáš (2017) by Martin Vopěnka, and Logoz aneb Robert Holm, marketér dánský (2019) by David Zábranský. The study focuses on literary (genre, narrative, motivic) and social (religious, spiritual, political, environmental) aspects of the (pseudo)messiah theme that are common to these novels. The analysis is based on the typology of the literary character in Daniela Hodrová’s work.
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The paper examines the relevant genological categories of factually based imaginative literature, considers various methods of its classification and proposes the notion of modular genology. The theoretical conclusions are applied to the case of Lukáš Onderčanin's book Utopia in Lenin's Garden.
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The study is focused on the novel by Daniela Kapitáňová: Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book. The goal is to analyze the moments found in the book: first, the cemetery motif, dark humour and danse macabre, then specifics of the region and its society and last the mystified narrator playing with authenticity.
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On the international literary scene Samuel Beckett has, to a considerable degree, established himself as a connoisseur of nothingness. Although this fact manifests itself primarily through his dramas, even a cursory glance at Beckett’s prosaic works would allow the reader to uncover mentioned problem in an unapologetically explicit context. This work is devoted to the outlining of the essence of nothingness in Samuel Beckett’s collection Texts for Nothing. Based on the series of thirteen texts, it analyzes the core of the named concept not only from the semantical and contextual viewpoints, but also linguistically. The language is being put under scrutiny both in terms of the narrator’s language competence and, generally, as a phenomenon and namely as the contour for delineatingthe essence of the notion as abstract as “nothing” – if not innately given, then obtained in the process of interpretation. The analysis also takes into the account such problematic aspects as the assumed, inherently impossible expression of nothingness and the failure of verbalization brought about by such a process.
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This study explores the voices of women in modern Japanese literature, focusing on female writers’ desire for autonomy in love during the beginning of the 20th century. Interestingly, female writers of this period often depict unfaithful wives. To explain this phenomenon, we examine the Japanese enthusiastic pursuit of European literary trends, such as the romantic reception of Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy), which glorifies adultery in the name of “true love.” In the Japanese literary world, empathy with the romantic concept of love idealized a longing for true love and overcame negative feeling towards adultery. Under these circumstances, female writers raised their voices for independence in love and marriage. Exemplifying the writers who adapted European literary and philosophical trends into their works to confront the laws and customs of Meiji Japan, this study clarifies that the trends paradoxically endorsed and created an explosive freedom for women to explore the concept of love.
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This chapter will assess the quick rise of “leprosy literature” in Japan during the latter half of the 1930s using much of the primary sources available, including diaries and letters privately penned by Hōjō Tamio, a young writer who was at its epicenter. I will begin by taking a look at the collection of “confessions” compiled by the government in 1921 to see how the authorities manipulated the voices of patients before the boom. Then I will focus on Hōjō, who was uniquely ambitious to join the mainstream literary establishment, while many residents of the leprosarium were reluctant to have their voices heard knowing that public scrutiny would only make them vulnerable in a society brimming with eugenic ideals. Finally, some discussion from a wider historical and cultural context should facilitate a clearer understanding on different forms of power that sought to control and sometimes aggravated the situations surrounding Hōjō and other patients.
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Thinking of China in the early 20th century and China today, one tends to highlight the great transformations dividing past and present. However, Chinese literature offers evidence of interesting thematic continuities, too. The figure of the beggar, an extremely significant yet voiceless outcast of society, is just one remarkable example. Represented by modern characters such as the protagonists of Lu Xun’s “Kong Yiji” (1919) and of Ba Jin’s “Dog” (1931), the beggar continues to appear in contemporary narratives, including A Yi’s short story “An Accidental Murder” (2010) and his novel Wake Me Up at 9:00 in the Morning (2014). Which continuities are traceable among these works? If literature has the power to voice the voiceless, what do the outcasts portrayed by these authors reveal to their readers? Drawing on Agamben’s reflections on the concept of testimony and on psychoanalytic categories, this chapter offers a comparative analysis of four case studies.
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As a culturally and linguistically hybrid product emerging from specific historical and political conditions, Sinophone Tibetan literature has been often overlooked in Western academic and literary circles. Still, as argued in this article, it is a plausible voice coming from within Tibet, shedding more light on the present lived reality of the region and its inhabitants and forming a multilayered minor discourse of self-representation vis-á-vis the major Han Chinese discourse regarding not only Tibetan history and culture, but, more generally, literary creation. By analyzing the various representations of present-day Tibet in short stories by Tsering Norbu, this paper provides insights into the formation of collective historical memory and transformation of Tibetan society following the economic development of the region after the year 2000. While responding to the official call for a realistic representation of the lives of ordinary people, the author has come up with effective counterhegemonic narrative strategies of resistance to the dominant forces of ideology and brutal commercialization by including elements of religion, suppressed historical memory, and social problems in contemporary Tibetan society.
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While the #MeToo movement has not gained much popularity in Japan, in recent years, several individuals and organizations have spoken out against gender discrimination and gender-based violence. At the same time, literature is also a place where women address these issues. The aim of this paper is to explore feminist voices in Japanese contemporary literature vis-à-vis recent feminist movements. The first part of this paper examines recent examples of gender-based violence in Japan and the actions initiated by women in response to them. The second part focuses on two novels: Kanojo wa atama ga warui kara (It’s Because She’s Stupid, 2018) by Kaoruko Himeno, and Jizoku kanō na tamashii no riyō (The Sustainable Use of Our Souls, 2020) by Aoko Matsuda. Through an interdisciplinary approach, this study aims to explore the connection between activism and literary studies, looking at literature as a feminist act of resistance.
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Sakuraba Kazuki is a former light novel writer whose literature shows awareness of issues of gender, with narratives about violence, power, and identity. This chapter provides an analysis of her light novel, Red x Pink, a story narrated by three protagonists who participate in a girls’ clandestine wrestling show, each of them performing a different type of character: the youthful Mayu, the dominatrix Miko, and the boyish Satsuki, whose narrative arc unveils a process of self-discovery and coming out as a transgendered man. The analysis of this work, informed by Azuma Hiroki’s concepts of database consumption and manga/anime-like realism, will clarify how Sakuraba expresses the gendered experiences of violence and exposes the consequences of oppression, appropriating the popular form of male-oriented media to narrate stories of oppressed young women and sexual minorities.
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The article presents three threads of the reception of Irzykowski’s works in Lviv in the 1930s concerning: the dispute on the role of intellectuals, the accusations of anti-Semitism, and Irzykowski’s theory of cinema. The cultural and literary environment of interwar Lviv did not accept Irzykowski’s intellectual indefiniteness and political independence. Irzykowski himself treated politics as an aesthetic rather than social space, which met with resistance of various circles.
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The first volume of Mickiewicz’s Poetry (Vilnius 1822) is regarded as the manifesto of Romanticism in Polish literature, although ordinarily only part of this vo- lume, namely Ballads and Romances, is taken into consideration. This article analyses the structural and thematic relationships between the three parts of the volume: the extensi- ve prose preface, the cycle of Ballads and Romances and Miscellaneous Poems. The volume as a whole is interpreted as a project and the first realisation of a new kind of Polish poetry: national through the use of folk motifs and the assumption of the widest, popular, and not exclusively elitist addressee, universal through being rooted in literary tradition from antiquity to Mickiewicz’s times. Poetry is supposed to speak about matters of importance to the nation, reviving its historical memory and bringing hope for the future, and many elements of the poetic programme and the themes of Poetry are continued in Mickiewicz’s later work. The utopian nature of the 1822 poetry programme is signalled in the subsequ- ent sections of the article. The poet assumed that the people, not the elite, formed the nucleus of the nation, and that folk imagination and creativity were the basis of national literature. Such poetry could not be created consistently if national literature in the Polish language was to grow out of the work of the people from several nations and using several languages in the pre-Partition Republic, and if it was to address itself to this multi-ethnic people. Moreover, if citizens did not have political power and representation, they were first and foremost serfs. This is why Mickiewicz’s work tends towards a “history of the no- bility”: an example would be Pan Tadeusz, where ‘the people’ refers much more clearly to the petty gentry than in 1822’s Poetry, and the accepted tradition is that of Polish literature from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, which is no longer in opposition to folk art.
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The article deals with the mythization of the geographical space of the Nowogródek region in Adam Mickiewicz’s Ballads and Romances. Krzysztof Trybuś introduces into his analysis and interpretation of Mickiewicz’s ballad series the category of memory as being equivalent to imagination, thus pointing to the analogy in William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. In his analysis, Trybuś takes into account both the rhetorical tradition of memory (ars) and the epistemological one (vis). He uses the notion of roman- tic memory with the cultural studies reflections of Aleida and Jan Assmann. Writing about places of memory in Mickiewicz’s ballad series, the author of the article also distinguishes kairotic places, marked by catastrophe. Trybuś links the historical context of Lithuania during the Napoleonic wars with the issue of death, which is heavily accentuated in Bal- lads and Romances. In the conclusion, he refers polemically to Maria Żmigrodzka’s well- -established thesis of two faces of early Romanticism in Poland. In doing so, he points out the similarity between Mickiewicz’s ballad cycle and Antoni Malczewski’s Maria in the preferential treatment of the theme of death.
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The starting point of the article is the question about the possibility of treating Adam Mickiewicz’s Widowisko as a popular drama. The author analyzes the work in terms of the genre’s rules, then wonders whether its shape was influenced by Mickie- wicz’s theatrical experiences or his reading. She then argues that Widowisko, more than theatre, was inspired by Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust and Jan Śniadecki’s disserta- tion O pismach klasycznych i romantycznych (On classical and romantic writings), and that the work goes beyond the boundaries of both the drama genre and the Faustian convention.
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The article deals with the reception of Early German Romanticism (es- pecially of Friedrich Schlegel’s concepts of progressive universal poetry and Romantic irony) in German literature, literary studies and criticism of the 1990s and early 2000s. It focuses on the implied and actual reception of early Romanticism in the works of authors such as Christian Kracht and Rainald Goetz, who are attributed to what is called pop-lit- erature [Popliteratur] in German literary studies. The article also includes an explanation of the term “Popliteratur”.
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