“It is more than needed in our country”. Contemporary Czech images of Scandinavia through the lens of literary criticism

Abstract

Before the age of mass media and mass travel (including tourism), cultural stereotypes were formed and communicated predominantly utilizing literature and other written sources (Fischer 1987). Nowadays, people travel extensively; they can get direct information from radio, television, and social media, yet stereotypes still seem to prevail. The general Czech contemporary notion of Scandinavian societies comes to the fore in the reviews of translated Scandinavian literature and Scandinavian (or Nordic) films, written by professionals and published in the edited press or the largely unedited social media. In these reviews, one can discern certain paradigms that doubtlessly amount to stereotypes. In this article, I will present a qualitative discourse analysis of Scandinavian stereotypes in the Czech reception of the Scandinavian arts, especially literature, taking into account the intertextual and contextual aspects of the Scandinavian ethnotypes occurring in reviews and paratexts in Czech mass media. I focus on two explicitly addressed images: The emancipated Scandinavian woman, and the alleged Scandinavian egalitarianism. Finally, I will resort to Tzvetan Todorov’s typology of relations to the Other. I will try to explain the activist criticism of Czech reviewers, who tend to compare the Czech situation with the Scandinavian one, using Todorov’s three axes describing the relation to alterity.