Milan Kundera Research Articles

In Memoriam: Kenneth McMillan Newton (1941–2021)

In Memoriam: Kenneth McMillan Newton (1941–2021)

In Memoriam: Kenneth McMillan Newton (1941–2021)

In Memoriam: Kenneth McMillan Newton (1941–2021)

Remembering Ken Newton

Remembering Ken Newton

Remembering Ken Newton

Remembering Ken Newton

The Truthful Inauthenticity of the Art of the Novel: Exploring History and Identity in Leonhard Praeg’s Imitation

ABSTRACT Review essay of Imitation, a novel by Leonhard Praeg. This analysis addresses the intertextual relationship between Imitation and Immortality (written by Milan Kundera). It focuses on the way the titular notion is examined from both an artistic and existential perspective. The philosophical qualities of the work are discussed in order to exemplify how the form of the novel provides the author with a creative way to acknowledge and explore the complex influence of imitation in the development our personal selves and the invention of original forms.

Invasion, Exile, and Resistance:

In this essay, I explore how Milan Kundera in his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, delineates the tyrannical biopolitics of a totalitarian state. I argue that the Soviet invasive biopolitics renders the Czech citizens alienated from their life, resources, and independence. Firstly, the obnoxious face of biopolitics manufactures exiles and fugitivity and, secondly, it destroys the dignity of an independent nation and turns it into a community of dissidents. Here, I build on Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, which in turn embarks on Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower or biopolitics. Mbembe critiques the racist, fascist, and nationalist forces that institutionalize the resurgence of “othering” a community to exclude it from the nation-state and kill it. Likewise, Foucault’s biopolitics interrogates the brutality of the nation-state that exercises the right of life and death over its subjects. This power takes hold of the human life: seizes that life, ends, impoverishes, and enslaves it. Thus, I focus on the all-pervasive impacts of biopolitics on the lives of individuals and argue that Kundera’s strategic biopolitics against the historical backdrop of the totalitarian surveillance and exile, at length, works as a subversive tool that stages resistance through his writing.

Symposium and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Symposium and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Kantian Categories of Ethics and Morality: A Reading of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is one of the most romantic stories set against a volatile political backdrop wherein the author deals with multiple issues on ideology, ethics and morality. Kant is a foundational thinker in terms of theorizing the notion of morality leading to almost universal categories of moral and ethical imperatives. Kundera’s novel quite significantly appears incommensurable to, what we can call as, universal “categories of imperatives.” Not only the question of morality but even the categories of ideological imperatives have also been emphatically interrogated by Kundera in the novel. The paper is an attempt to understand the Kantian categories as propounded in his The Critique of Practical Reason and revisit Kundera’s novel for a critical engagement to relook at the questions of universal categories of morality as well as ideology. Quite significantly, Kundera uses the term “kitsch” in the novel almost as a discursive tool to counter and denounce the proclamations of the superiority of essentialist political ideology. The novel essentially problematises the Kantian notion of universal morality showing how the universal categories of both morality and reason are inadequate propositions to address the limitless terrains of heterogeneous imperatives.

Agon, los a może fatum? Milana Kundery zmagania z Europą Środkową

The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the Central European idea in Milan Kundera’s work. The study analyses key works for the Central European category: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Stolen West or The Tragedy of Central Europe. This text is an attempt to create the Kundera’s dictionary of Central Europe, and therefore it addresses such categories as fate and fate, memory and forgetfulness, scapegoat theory and the metaphorical death of the novel. The article highlights the key role of culture as a matter of Central European identity in opposition to the dominant historical-political discourse.

Le tropisme philosophique de Milan Kundera : Le roman à la recherche de la définition perdue

The Philosophical Tropism of Milan Kundera: The Novel in Search of the lost Definition(Abstract ) The philosophical tropism of Milan Kundera is manifested in particular by his novels in search of lost definition. The creation and the redefinition of concepts in his novels aiming at elucidating the essence show his ambition to " make philosophy in the way of a novelist". We examine his processes in the invention of concepts and the definition of words, as well as the similarity between his works and phenomenology, particularly Merleau-Ponty's approach. Through the metaphoricity of language and the inseparability between definitions and characters in his novels, Kundera revives a missed rendezvous between philosophy and novel. The definition of concept is no longer the privilege of philosopher. By the tireless pursuit of defining "the indefinable", Kundera transforms the novel into a place of phenomenological description and a field of thought experimentation, despite his ambiguity about this rapprochement.

Estructura de una broma

Milan Kundera nació en Brno, Checoslovaquia, el 1 de abril de 1929, fue profesor en la Escuela de Estudios Cinematográfcos de Praga, puesto que perdió tras la invasión rusa de 1968. Sus obras fueron entonces retiradas de la biblioteca de su país y su nombre desapareció de los manuales de historia literaria. Desde 1975 reside en París. La primera novela de Kundera, La broma, obtuvo el premio de la Unión de Escritores Checoslovacos en 1968. La edición que comentamos es la segunda reimpresión del 2006, realizada por la Editorial SeixBarral. El propósito de este ensayo es presentar ante el lector la estructura de cualquier broma. Para ello, lo hemos dividido en cinco partes. En la primera, describimos la broma. En la segunda, analizamos al sujeto que padece la broma. En la tercera, presentamos lo que llamamos los hermeneutas de la broma, indicando con ello que siempre, junto a una broma, hay sujetos muy inteligentes que la interpretan. En la cuarta, que es indudablemente la parte central de nuestro ensayo, describimos las consecuencias que se desprenden de una broma, y aquí lo que tenemos que tener presente es la capacidad que tiene una broma para determinar la totalidad de la vida del bromista. En la quinta, describimos lo que llamamos la redención del bromista. Al estructurar de este modo nuestro ensayo, buscamos llamar la atención del lector sobre nuestra clave de lectura de esta novela: no se pretende hacer una lectura sistemática de la novela. En rigor, la novela ha sido un medio para hacer la fenomenología de una broma, no sólo de la broma a la que se refiere nuestro novelista, sino de cualquier broma.

Reception of the ancient Oedipus myth in Milan Kundera’s novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

Reception of the ancient Oedipus myth in Milan Kundera’s novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

Le tropisme philosophique de Milan Kundera : Le roman à la recherche de la définition perdue

The Philosophical Tropism of Milan Kundera: The Novel in Search of the lost Definition The philosophical tropism of Milan Kundera is manifested in particular by his novels in search of lost definition. The creation and the redefinition of concepts in his novels aiming at elucidating the essence show his ambition to " make philosophy in the way of a novelist". We examine his processes in the invention of concepts and the definition of words, as well as the similarity between his works and phenomenology, particularly Merleau-Ponty's approach. Through the metaphoricity of language and the inseparability between definitions and characters in his novels, Kundera revives a missed rendezvous between philosophy and novel. The definition of concept is no longer the privilege of philosopher. By the tireless pursuit of defining "the indefinable", Kundera transforms the novel into a place of phenomenological description and a field of thought experimentation, despite his ambiguity about this rapprochement.

Postmodern laughter as an anti-foundational agent

Laughter has been viewed as an ironical tool in the postmodern world of subversion, playfulness, and parody. The contemporary age of postmodernism has a great comic spirit in its trends which challenges the established foundations. The present study is an attempt to demonstrate the function of laughter as an anti-foundational agent from a postmodernist perspective in the two novels, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco and The Joke by Milan Kundera. The essence of anti-foundational laughter has been explored through the lens of three theories of laughter; The Incongruity Theory by Arthur Schopenhauer, The Anti-Mechanical Theory by Henri Bergson, The Super-Laughter Theory by Friedrich Nietzsche. The selected novels have been analysed to highlight the function of laughter as a powerful source of challenge, distortion, and change which help challenge the religious, political and social foundations. It has shown a new perspective of laughter and has opened new facades of postmodernism in traditional theories of laughter as well as in the selected novels.

V. Voiculescu’s Novel: A Modern Depository of the Traditional Beliefs

Abstract Part of a larger research, initially thought and written as an essay, our paper is a transdisciplinary approach on Elmar Salmann’s idea of the novel as the modern depository of humanity’s religious and philosophical legacy, which would otherwise not find a way to express itself nowadays. As a support, we are using the one and only novel of a profound religious Romanian writer – V. Voiculescu’s Zahei Orbul (Zahei the Blind) –, trying to reveal Jean-Luc Marion’s concept of “distance” but also Milan Kundera’s view regarding the matter as it is discussed in The Art of the Novel. As stated before, in our deductive approach, we are using Basarab Nicolesco’s “the hidden third”, the basic concept in transdisciplinary research. Our conclusion is that Voiculescu’s novel is constructed on the grounds of God’s “absence”, as He retreats in the “distance”. This “absence” is supported by a net of Christian symbols on which the modern world’s elements are being interwoven in Midrash style, as Constantin Jinga states.

Narrative Control or Aesthetic Ideal: Cognitive Narrative Reading of Milan Kundera’s Life Is Elsewhere

This study, which is inspired by Cognitive Poetics, aims to test the feasibility of its basic methods on the analysis of Milan Kundera’s novel Life Is Elsewhere (1973). Kundera’s style seems at first plain, but greater importance was given to his philosophical and psychological treatment of subjects than the narratological world that he creates. He brilliantly mixes many narrative techniques to expose his existential and aesthetic ideals. The aesthetic value of the novel studied under the cognitive stylistic approach in this study sought answers to the following question. How can Life Is Elsewhere (1973) be read from a cognitive linguistic perspective? The findings confirmed the relevance of the cognitive poetic approach to the narrow reading of Milan Kundera’s works. Life Is Elsewhere (1973) is a merit of narrative control in that the author allows the reader to live the life story of a young poet, to appreciate his ups and downs, at the same time, read his philosophical ideas about life and his artistic control of the novel. Though a cognitively inspired approach might seem odd at the thematic level, for a purely hermeneutic researcher, the level at which both author and reader would exchange meaning from the text is catered for in the rich textual world of the novel. The latter sustains the universality of the works and confirms the suitability of the cognitive poetic framework to any piece of literature.

Immigrant Elites in South-East European Cultures During the 20th Century

Abstract The cultural and existential crisis of exile entails, above all, an abolition of time and space, a location outside of their identity. In a sort of “transculturality”, in Milan Kundera’s words, or, simultaneously, in two cultures at the same time. And the condition of exile, a wandering, remains the key status of the the writer, who is a traveler par excellence. A prophet that must carry into the world and into history his message, sentenced to mobility

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.

O KITSCH NA EPISTEMOLOGIA DO ROMANCE

O presente artigo tem como objetivo apresentar o conceito de kitsch como conceito estético e ontológico na perspectiva teórica da Epistemologia do Romance. Para a Epistemologia do Romance, a palavra kitsch é associada ao pensamento de Milan Kundera acerca do que ele chama de necessidade da mentira embelezante para satisfação de si. A Epistemologia do Romance ampara-se à ideia kunderiana de ocultação da “merda” como um ideal estético do ser em que o kitsch, como forma estética da negação de questões da condição humana, lida com aquilo que Hermann Broch define como ausência de reflexão ética no contexto da estética, fomentado pela necessidade do efeito estético agradável. Para a Epistemologia do Romance, o kitsch é a forma estética do idílio. Buscando assim uma falsa beleza e harmonia que trouxesse uma sensação de paz e fim da tragédia.

Kundera and Ionesco on the Unmistakable Awareness of Being Minor

Deleuze and Guattari’s 1975 text, Kafka, pour une littérature mineure, posited a theory concerning some groups of literary texts including those of Franz Kafka. Their theory was nevertheless highly connected to their own historical and geographical context in France, and much less so with that of Kafka who had himself previously attempted to theorize small literatures. By looking at the context of Kafka and of two other writers who might be considered as belonging to minor literary contexts, I argue that theorists of minor literature tend to view minor literature in a positive way when their own cultural context is further from nation-state building. On the other hand, those writers who are writing from inside nation-building contexts tend to emphasize minor literature’s limits on literary production. Interestingly, Milan Kundera and Eugene Ionesco who had first-hand experience of nation-building contexts, but then moved to France and wrote in French, take more nuanced views of minor literatures as they are further removed in time and space from their original minor contexts.