The Politics, Pollence and Price of Literary Studies

Abstract

The razing of the Berlin Wall, dreams or nightmares of multiculturalism, the bloating of academia and consequent endeavours to find new, productive seams from which to mine new fields of scholarship in countries that sentimental liberals considered culturally wronged and spiritually advanced, all these have combined to make it possible for three books on modern Czech literature to appear in English within five years. Furthermore, liberal guilt at Western affluence and at fellow-Europeans’ dreary imprisonment behind Communist Party barbed wire led to an enormous increase in the number of books, by both defectors from and inhabitants of the Bloc, appearing in translation; this meant that a proportion of the Western middle classes gained a passing knowledge of at least some Czech literature. Two modern Czech writers, Milan Kundera and Josef Skvorecký, have had several books each devoted to them in English, not normally written by people who know Czech literature at all well. The razing of the Wall and advances in communications have meant that the Czechs are no longer exotic, are beginning to regain the status they had in the Middle Ages and, briefly, in the second third of the seventeenth century. This means that students no longer have any excuse for not writing books and articles that offer interpretations, analyses and literary historical investigation that will be as original and stimulating as any piece of work produced by Czech students of Czech literature. In this review I shall be considering books by Steiner, Porter and Chitnis almost solely on the basis of what they contribute to the knowledge and interpretation of twentieth-century Czech literature. Steiner, a defector, began his academic career in America as an interpreter of Russian Formalism, wrote a well-nigh classic study on the school, and so willy-nilly contributed to the spread of cultural theory in the English-speaking world, and thus to the growth of that vacuous opacity that sullied much literary criticism, in the East as well as the West, over the last two-thirds of the twentieth century. In Deserts of Bohemia, however, though he starts each chapter with a philosopher or theorist whom he uses to elucidate the author or work in