Czech Fiction Research Articles

Conceptualizing Literary History: A Survey of Poetics in Czech Fiction 1860–1910. Part Two

The article provides an innovative model of poetics (or isms, styles, etc.) in Czech prose in the latter half of the long 19th century. It gives an overview of seven individualized and mutually distinct poetics, including ideal, analytical, and psychological realisms, Parnassism, naturalism, impressionism, and decadence. The individual poetics do not represent periods, but exist in parallel, allowing confrontations and intersections either within the author’s work or in a specific text, as in the model of Czech literature developed by Dalibor Tureček in the past decade. They are always set in the context of European literature and supported by many illustrative examples. The model is not only typological, but also assumes a diachronic perspective, which can be developed in future scholarly work on the history of Czech literature. The aim is to create a system that can potentially be applied not only to Czech fiction, but possibly also to poetry or drama, in other periods and literatures. Part Two of the article concentrates on psychological realism, Parnassism, naturalism, impressio- nism, and decadence.

Conceptualizing Literary History: A Survey of Poetics in Czech Fiction 1860–1910 (Part One)

The article provides an innovative model of poetics (or isms, styles, etc.) in Czech prose in the latter half of the long 19th century. It gives an overview of seven individualized and mutually distinct poetics, including ideal, analytical, and psychological realisms, Parnassism, naturalism, impressionism, and decadence. The individual poetics do not represent periods, but exist in parallel, allowing confrontations and intersections either within the author's work or in a specific text, as in the model of Czech literature developed by Dalibor Tureček in the past decade. They are always set in the context of European literature and supported by many illustrative examples. The model is not only typological, but also assumes a diachronic perspective, which can be developed in future scholarly work on the history of Czech literature. The aim is to create a system that can potentially be applied not only to Czech fiction, but possibly also to poetry or drama, in other periods and literatures. Part One of the article concentrates on a general overview and on ideal and analytical realisms.

Children's literature as a motivational factor for physical activities through the example of Jaroslav Foglar

AbstractDespite many philosophical and scientific appeals, physical inactivity, especially in children and young people, remains one of the most serious problems of contemporary civilisation. In our sub‐study of wider research, we focus on the use of Czech fiction and comics by Jaroslav Foglar as a motivational factor to increase readers' physical activity. The respondents (n = 1174) were mostly adults who had spent their childhood or adolescence reading the works of Jaroslav Foglar. These people valued exercise (70%) in this reading, with a high correlation (0.73) to a healthy lifestyle (abstinence from alcohol and smoking). For 57% of the respondents, these values from reading also become an inspiration for application in life (there is a causal link between the degree of awareness of being influenced by the work and the actual application of the physical activity), with even higher values recorded for camping and being in a natural environment, as well as moral behaviour, ethical principles, and helping others. Thus, we can confirm that the inspiration of the fictional world of literature can become a motivational impulse to increase physical activity in the real world, moreover in the context of a very strong awareness of ethical values and moral behaviour.

‘Bestseller’ is no longer a rude word: negotiating the art/commerce balance by Czech fiction publishers

In this paper, I focus on how major fiction publishers renegotiate the art/commerce balance in the contemporary Czech literary field and I discuss their strategies in terms of conservative and progressive variants of rules of art and rules of commerce. I show that Czech publishers face many similar challenges known from the global literary field: they feel the field is getting faster, tighter, and more money-driven. Their responses still may be specific given the differences in historical development and culture they act within. In these conditions, new aspects of shifting literary rules may emerge. Thus, the paper contributes to the discussion on the shifting and blending rules in literary fields nowadays. The study is based on Bourdieu's theoretical model of the literary field and works with 24 semi-structured interviews with publishing professionals from houses that produce fiction of various types – highbrow, commercial, Czech, and translated – and that are of sizes from small to mid-sized to large. The research was conducted from 2010-16.

Finding a voice: The Slovak-Roma woman writer in Irish and Czech fiction

The theory of minor literature (based on Kafka’s hybrid identity in Prague) is applicable to the complex case of Czech and Slovak-Romani writing, including fictional portrayals of the Roma. The Irish-American writer Colum McCann’s Zoli, published in 2006, features a Slovak-Roma woman who becomes an acclaimed poet under the Communist regime, only to be cast out by her community and forced into exile. Two years later, Irena Eliášová (a Roma writer born in Slovakia who lives in the Czech Republic) published her novel Our Settlement (Naše osada), a far more affectionate view of the Roma society of her childhood. Both writers walk an uneasy balance in presenting Slovak-Roma culture from both insider and outsider perspectives. In McCann’s case the intention of bringing one of Europe’s most misunderstood minorities to anglophone readers struggles to avoid cultural appropriation, while Eliášová’s use of multilingualism negotiates the power dynamics between Czech, Slovak, and Romani.

Differences in the lexical variation of reporting verbs in French, English and Czech fiction and their impact on translation

Abstract The aims of this paper are to analyse differences in the degree of lexical variation (type/token ratio and hapax/token ratio) of reporting verbs in reporting clauses placed medially or in postposition in English, French and Czech fiction and to evaluate their consequences in translation, especially in regard to explicitation/implicitation. We expect that, in translations from a language with a low degree of lexical variation of reporting verbs into a language with a high degree of lexical variation, the frequency and the degree of explicitation will be higher than in translations involving languages less different with respect to lexical variation. The analysis, relying on data extracted from the InterCorp multilingual corpus, proposes a classification of reporting verbs based on the type and amount of information conveyed, which allows evaluating the degree of explicitation operated in translations. The results show that most shifts involve only the neutral reporting verb say/dire, replaced by a stylistically more specific synonym or by a verb explicitating information obvious from the context. This suggests that modifications of reporting verbs in translation are motivated primarily by respect for the stylistic norm of the target language and the degree of acceptability of the repetition of the neutral reporting verb.

Czech Culture Wars: Is Milan Kundera ‘a Bastard’?

ABSTRACT Like many countries of the world these days, the Czech Republic is afflicted by intractable culture wars. People obstinately hold on to their ideological positions because they give them power. The world-famous Czech author Milan Kundera, who was a communist until the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, is one of the subjects of such intractable culture wars, currently raging in the Czech Republic. The conflict about Kundera was deepened in June 2020 with the publication of a highly critical, 900-page ‘biography’ of Milan Kundera by another Czech fiction writer, former emigré to the United States Jan Novák. This piece comprises two reviews of Novák’s work, one by a well-know Czech broadcaster and the other by Professor of Czech Literature at Charles University, Prague.

Česká postmoderna — nedokončený projekt? Diskuse o vlivu postmodernismu na české myšlení o dějinách a literatuře po roce 1989

The study focuses on recapitulation of the development and recent state of the discussion about postmodernist tendencies in Czech fiction and historiography after 1989. In the introduction, the author tries to define the basic characteristics of postmodernism and to clarify its position in Slavic literary culture. Then he tries to describe the debates about postmodernism in Czech academic and publicistic communication and takes into account their variability – the author submits a three-phase scheme framed by the background of the past three decades. While Czech historians remain distrutsful of postmodern thinking, Czech literary scholars have been researching postmodernism from different angles continuously.

Infinitival verb phrases in english and their translations to czech – a contrastive study of non-finite verb phrases in english and czech fiction

Infinitival verb phrases in english and their translations to czech – a contrastive study of non-finite verb phrases in english and czech fiction

A Need for Greater Openness: The Countryside in Czech Fiction since 1989

In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams rides a metaphorical escalator back through English literary history, noting how writers repeatedly return from ‘the city’ to ‘the country’ to lament the destruction of a better, more ‘organic’ way of life. The conception of ‘the country’ is not identical in each case: What seemed a single escalator, a perpetual recession into history, turns out, on reflection, to be a more complicated movement: Old England, settlement, the rural virtues — all these, in fact, mean different things at different times, and quite different values are being brought into question. We shall need precise analysis of each kind of retrospect, as it comes. 1 The persistence of these returns, however, in all urbanized literatures, seems to Williams to reflect ‘some permanent or effectively permanent need, to which the changing interpretations speak’. 2 Most basically, ‘the country’ represents for human beings their origins, an ‘other’ against which their present state may be measured, both positively and negatively:

Robert Porter. An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Czech Fiction: Comedies of Defiance. Brighton, UK and Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2001. ix, 209 pp. $29.95. Distributed by International Specialized Book Services, Inc., Portland, OR.

Robert Porter. An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Czech Fiction: Comedies of Defiance. Brighton, UK and Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2001. ix, 209 pp. $29.95. Distributed by International Specialized Book Services, Inc., Portland, OR.

An Introduction to Twentieth Century Czech Fiction: Comedies of Defiance by Robert Porter (review)

262 Reviews An Introduction to Twentieth Century Czech Fiction: Comedies ofDefiance. By Robert Porter. Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press. 2001. ix + 209 pp. ?45.00 (pbk ?15.00). ISBN 1-902210-80-8 (pbk 1-902210-81-6). During the greater part ofthe twentieth century Czech writers were doomed to create their works under the sword of Damocles, whether it took the form of the censorship of the Austro-Hungarian state at the beginning of the era, or the Nazi suppression near its middle, or the Communist stifiing,intimidating atmosphere for most of the second half of the century. They were not silenced?it was just that, if they could not express themselves fully and freely,they often camouflaged their defiance with laughter, irony,satire, or black comedy. Robert Porter's book is subtitled 'Comedies of Defiance', but it is far more than that. He has managed to squeeze his material into a study of just nine representative authors (seven chapters), but hosts of names, works, themes, and comments file past for comparison and assessment. The author's wide knowledge of Czech as well as other literatures is only too obvious. The felicitous selection of the nine representatives has resulted in deeper studies of their most important works: these are analysed, interpreted, evaluated, and moreover?by way of comparison?set into the broader framework of other contemporary literatures. Thus, Hasek's The Good Soldier &vejk features (rightly or wrongly?) alongside T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom and?less prominently?with Sholokhov's The Quiet Don. Although Hasek's and Kafka's lifestyles differed diametrically, they both 'discovered thevworld of the self (p. 19) in their works. Importantly, we are also reminded that Svejk is not the only creation of Hasek: he wrote many other prose works which combine life and art. Karel Capek, as the main representative of Czech literature abroad during the inter-war period,gets well-deserved attention in this book, although Porter considers as a weakness Capek's use of his characters as vehicles for his ideas, which I believe to be a deliberate device for a good purpose. Rather than praising the innovative, highly acclaimed philosophical trilogy Hordubal, Meteor, An Ordinary Life, Porter prefers Tales from Two Pockets, in which 'we can perceive the nuts and bolts of his art' (p. 48). Bohumil Hrabal appears here as the creator of 'small people and tall tales' (p. 52). In his penetrating study of Hrabal's works Porter admires his linguistic virtuosity, verging on the eccentric, and his great art as an inexhaustible raconteur, as Hrabal can entertain by blending the sublime with the commonplace and the horrific. Josef Skvorecky also figures here as an impulsive storyteller, but one who uses emigration 'as a literary device' (p. 118). He derives amusement from the linguistic quirks the Czech language has fallen prey to in emigration, but, in his works, particularly The Engineer ofHuman Souls, they are, in Porter's view, 'a small price to pay for the cosmopolitan riches that are on offer' (p. 116). In this chapter Porter is at his best, although he has not neglected any vital aspects of the other writers included in this book. The slim volumes of unaffected writing by the nature-lover Ota Pavel came out as a breath of fresh air in the tense atmosphere of the 'normalization' of the 1970s (and thus earned him space in this publication). Ivan Klima's 'conscience and moral conundrums ' (p. 136) may appear as a simple contrast to Pavel, but there is much more to Klima, as Porter does not fail to stress. Pointingout the temperamental affinity and spiritual relationship of Klima with Kafka, Porter detects a growing despondency in the former's novels; he sees his greatest power 'when he restricts himself to shorter forms' (p. 148). Three post-Communist 'new voices' of note can be heard in the con? cluding chapter?Daniela Hodrova, Michal Viewegh, and Jachym Topoi?as they represent wider literary trends. One cannot praise enough Porter's method of presenting Czech fictionof the twen? tieth century by the in-depth study of a few, but well-chosen, prose writers. He is MLRy 98.1, 2003 263 selective...

An introduction to twentieth-century Czech fiction: comedies of defiance

An introduction to twentieth-century Czech fiction: comedies of defiance

Word Made Flesh: Czech Women's Writing from Communism to Post-Communism

Abstract This article explores changes in from communism to post- communism, focusing in particular on women writers' relationship to literary discourse and feminism. It contends that women writers' rapport to ideological discourse and literary production under communism is a determining factor in relationship to both writing and feminism. It examines this literary legacy in terms of post-communism, surveying differences between a totalitarian socialist regime and that of a materialist, capitalist economy, as exemplified in literature. The article offers a survey major post-communist women writers, including Hodrova, Bouckova, Kriseova, as well as delving into a comparative close-reading analysis of two representatives of both communist and post-communist writing: Eva Kanturkova's Pritelkyne z domu smutku (Companions Of The Bleak House) and Iva Pekarkova's Kulaty svet (The World is Round). Both these texts offer a challenging vision of women's community for today's global order. Key Words: Czech, Women, literature ********** beginning was Word, and Word was with God, and Word was God And Word became flesh and lived among us ... (John 1:1; 1:14 NRSV) I begin with a rather revelationary quote, perhaps because my endeavor in this essay appears rather apocryphal: I will attempt a synoptic account of transition of from communist to post-communist era. At outset I faced with three seemingly eschatological dilemmas. First is difficulty I find in establishing a body of Czech fiction in corpus of literature when my belief is that good literature transcends all gender categorization, as it speaks of desires driving one's being and therefore tends towards universal human condition. Second, however, I am also convinced that, asymptotically, good writing is derived from an individual experience, which is gendered indeed, and so I must allow for a gendered women's experience which could be shared collectively. Finally, while oscillating between individualism and universalism, I must somehow take into account diversity of women writers that have contributed to literature over fifty year period but at same time positing a fundamental change revolving around of 1989 Velvet Revolution: communism and post-communism. Taking into account these dilemmas, I offer this revelationary parabolic parable: that from communism to post communism transformed from to flesh. The bare-bone skeleton of this argument may be structured as follows. In communism, language, both in its oppressive and resistant form, established Word as paradigm defining governing economy and resistant literary economy--the Word was God. In pre-revolutionary summer of 1989,Vaclav Havel drew from same Bible passage as I: can be said to be very source of our being, and in fact substance of cosmic life form we call human one thing would seem to be obvious: we have always believed in power of words to change history. (WW 377-378) Havel illustrates how under communism, power of words formulated itself in collective and generic terms, either as totalizing communalism of totalitarian system or in dissident denunciation advocating universal human rights. Conversely, in post-communism, the word became shift to a market economy, private property and democracy favored a turn to individualism, material concerns, and emphasis on body. In summer of 1991, in newly-formed Czechoslovak Federation, Havel's cautions against harmful effects of post-communism, which he submits are most saliently felt in flesh: the catastrophic decline in general cultural level, level of public manners, related to economic decline . …

Original and Translation in the Czech Fiction of Milan Kundera

Original and Translation in the Czech Fiction of Milan Kundera

Daylight in Nightclub Inferno: Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation

Daylight in Nightclub Inferno: Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation

Original and Translation in the Czech Fiction of Milan Kundera

'Translation is everything', wrote Milan Kundera, underlining the centrality of the translation process to his novels.1 Kundera's novels written in Czech were read almost exclusively in translation following a ban on his work in the then Czechoslovakia, effective from 1970 until the fall of the Communist regime in 1989. After 1989, it seemed that translation would no longer be a necessity for achieving a wide readership; Kundera began to write novels in the language of his adopted homeland, French, and also regained his Czech audience. By the end of the 1990s, however, only three of his six novels written in the Czech language had appeared in print in the Czech Republic.2 Aggrieved readers prompted Kundera to explain the delay: he commented that no original Czech manuscript existed, and that, before they could be published, these novels had to be rendered 'definitive'.3 In this article, I wish to invert Kundera's statement and suggest that, in Kundera's fiction written in Czech, everything is translation: that the original version of each of his Czech prose works has been displaced and rewritten, partly because of their translation into French and English.4 Seven works of fiction are involved. Kundera's first two prose works written and published in Czech, Zert (The Joke) and Smesne Idsky (Laughable Loves), have been altered, the originals replaced by new versions in Czech as well as in translation. The Joke will be discussed in full shortly. Smesne Idsky was published first as three separate collections of ten short stories between 1963 and 1968, then in a collated version containing eight of the stories in 1970. The 1968 Czech version was reprinted in 1981 and contained seven stories; Kundera had decided to omit the eighth when proofing the French translation. Smesne Idsky was published in the Czech Republic as a collection of short stories in 1991, with numerous alterations from the initial versions of the stories published 1963-8 and from the 1981 version. On Kundera's initiative, Smesne Idsky is published as a novel in German and Spanish (Das Buch der lacherlichen Liebe, Frankfurt, 1989, and El Libro De Los Amoves Ridiculos, third edition, Barcelona, 1998), while remaining a collection of

The deserts of Bohemia: Czech fiction and its social context

The deserts of Bohemia: Czech fiction and its social context

Daylight in nightclub inferno: Czech fiction from the post-Kundera generation

Daylight in nightclub inferno: Czech fiction from the post-Kundera generation

Daylight in Nightclub Inferno: Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation

Daylight in Nightclub Inferno: Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation