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Lists the doctoral degrees granted in foreign languages, literature, culture, linguistics, and foreign language education in 1981. The order of entries is major field or area of specialization, institution, author, title of dissertation, and director or supervisor of dissertation. (EKN)

How do contemporary Czech authors reflect on what is going in their society? This article considers the work of five Czech authors. Emil Hakl looks at contemporary Czech reality as an outsider. Jiří Hájíček produces subtle accounts of interhuman relations. Jáchym Topol is a provocative experimenter who produces fantasmagoric narratives. All these authors deal also with the traumatised past, Nazism and communism. David Zábranský has been accused of writing the first ever ‘fascist’ novel in the Czech language. Karol Sidon (Chaim Cigan) has produced a highly readable tetralogy which takes place in many different countries and many different eras, even in an alternative reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractLesbian voices and experiences have received little attention in Czech historiography: recent research has concentrated on the modern era from the 1950s. This article deepens our understanding of lesbian lives in interwar Prague. It focuses on two forgotten lesbian novels, Exiles of Love and The Third Sex, which were deliberately suppressed after 1948 by the Communist regime as examples of inferior bourgeois literature. The two authors, Lída Merlínová and Gill Sedláčková, both hailed from Prague’s cultural world (theatre and film) and were active too in the 1930s Czech movement for homosexual reform. Spanning the late twenties to the late thirties, the novels reveal tantalising glimpses of the evolving sub-culture of interwar Prague. Merlínová’s naïve novel of 1929, Exiles of Love, was the first Czech lesbian novel, and it betrayed the 1920s optimism of the ‘Czech New Woman’ who was prepared to challenge gender stereotypes. Sedláčková’s novel, The Third Sex, is a more explicit study from 1937, reflecting the more mature sub-culture but also a cynicism about the chances of homosexual reform. Yet it manages, even more than Exiles, to convey an uplifting and moral message. Indeed, both novels are about lesbian self-knowledge, exploring the scope for same-sex survival in a world where the best solution may be abroad, not in ‘provincial Prague’. In restoring these texts to lesbian literature we recover a range of voices, expressing the hopes and frustrations of some queer Czech women in an unusually liberal era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The aim of the paper is a comparative analysis of selected aspects of the singular styles of the historical epics Sárka by Jaroslav Vrchlický (1853-1912) and Ctirad Julius Zeyer (1841-1901); classical authors of Czech literature from the so-called Lumira generation of the second half of the 19th century. The juxtaposition of thema- tically similar texts allowed for a more pronounced identification of the characteristic features of the singular styles of both poets, possibly the specificity of their historical and mythic epic poetry, ideally the stylistic dominance of the authorial styles of Jaroslav Vrchlický and Julius Zeyer in mutual comparison. In order to achieve the set objectives, the methods of comparative and mathematical stylistics were used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 indivi- dualized 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 in- tersections 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a select survey of the rendering of personal names in translation into English from European languages with different scripts from the turn of the twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. Works of prose fiction were chosen from Czech and Icelandic, which use characters that are not part of the English alphabet. Their original publication dates are from the middle of the nineteenth to the late twentieth century, with translations trailing by years or even decades. The authors of the original works were very well known and in some cases Nobel Prize laureates. This gives assurance that their works attracted good translators and, in some cases, multiple translators. The hypothesis was that over the course of more than a century, there has been a growing tendency to respect the original spellings of personal names in translations – that is, to employ the source language’s script, even when the literary works belong to relatively peripheral European cultures. The explanations for this include increased cultural contacts, the expansion of what has traditionally been called world literature, and internet resources.

The main aim of the paper is to highlight the relationship between Christianity and homosexuality based on selected fiction texts by Czech writers and poets (Zeyer, Fuks, Kuběna, Georgiev). The selected authors represent different historical periods and different currents of opinion. We are convinced that the theoretical part provides a suitable methodological basis for the part of the paper in which we discuss homosexual motives in selected works of the mentioned authors. To sum up, we can state that the explicit expression of homoerotic and other motives is only relevant today; in artistic narratives dating back to the 19th and 20th centuries, these symbols are expressed in a hidden way, and it is up to each recipient to decide whether and to what extent they see them in these narratives. Zeyer could not fully express himself; he was forced to use hidden symbols to be who he felt he was, at least in his works. Kuběna, in the context of the 1970s, treats the topic of homosexuality very openly, he is not afraid of being condemned by society. Fuks´ works are characterized by a considerable degree of autobiography. Despite Georgiev´s clear rejection of faith, a believing homosexual appears more than once in his work. In this paper we try to fill a certain gap in the field of comparative research in works of art and poems by authors who in some way tended to homosexuality because within the Czech context, we have encountered this area of scholarly articles sporadically.

This paper strives to illuminate the forebodings of AI and automatization's impact on society in two neglected Czech treasures unavailable in English, Čestmír Vejdělek's Návrat z ráje [Return from Paradise] (1961) and Jiří Marek's Blažený Věk [The Blessed Age] (1967). The study aims to illustrate science fiction's prescience and part of Czech SF's path after Čapek, while challenging the notion that "the utopian society is a subject, perhaps even the only subject that is inaccessible to literature" (Hans Magnus Enzensberger). For these dystopian texts engage readers to imagine the positive alternative to the portrayed societies, rather than explicitly evoking eutopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines modern knowledge about non-human primates in Czech travel narratives concerning Africa and biological journals from the late nineteenth century to the end of the interwar period. Particular attention is given to the way discourse on primates and anthropological discourse mutually influenced each other. Inspired by the intersection of human -- animal studies, critical race theory, and gender studies, the paper emphasizes the anthropomorphizing character of biological discourse and popular travel narratives. At the time, presentations of primates created a specific anthropological resource and, in addition, helped to naturalize the dominant racial and gender ideologies. In the context of the Austrian--Hungarian and Czechoslovakian relative inability to obtain colonial possessions in the way western powers did, the representations of anthropomorphized non-human primates can also be interpreted as a specific field where Czech colonial fantasies about dominance were expressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is devoted to the issue of the mythologisation of the space of Olšany Cemetery performed by Daniela Hodrová in her trilogy Trýznivé město (City of Torment). The article consists of two parts: the first one is a theoretical introduction about the concepts of myth, cemetery and maze, and the cultural connection between them. The second part contains an analysis of Olšany Cemetery as presented in the trilogy. Hodrová depicts the cemetery as a kind of mythical space which has the nature of a maze, where the living and the dead both share the fate of being prisoners.

Ecocriticism represents a trend of thought that has been gaining ground in the Czech academic milieu, and thinking about it raises a number of questions at the moment: whether there are any local analogues of ecocriticism, whether it makes sense to transfer the theory to the local context, and what the impact of such transfer could be. The main part of the article is devoted to the different phases of ecological consciousness in Czech literature and illustrates three of them with examples: the Romantic (Mácha, Erben, Furch), the early 20th century (Deml, Neumann) and the 1980s (Páral, Juliš). The conclusion of the article focuses on the question of the awareness of the state in these different phases and its inevitable incompleteness.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes a hypothesis that traditional imagological concepts are no longer sufficient for interpreting the current and recent “imagological situation”. The authors argue that given the significant changes in the geopolitical ordering of the world in the post-imperial period, it is necessary to expand and internally categorize the terms to capture a more nuanced way of looking at the “other”. The article provides a summary of existing approaches and suggests innovations, particularly in making a careful distinction between the self-image of the internal and external, and the disaggregation of the “meta-image” into several layers. The authors point out that imagological research needs to consider that the ethnic identity of the recipient is not unambiguous, which problematizes the interrelation of “us” and “them”. Additionally, in post-imperialism, there is an unravelling of the former bipolar perception. The authors trace the image in the context of concepts such as image, stereotype, and brand. The essay aims to analyse the manifestations of the emerging neo-imperialism, which returns to the traditional contrasting delineation of “our” and “the foreign”. It also examines the factor of evaluation and the question of fictionality. The effectiveness of the new approaches is demonstrated in a Russian-Czech comparative analysis of selected novels by Vladimir Sorokin and Jáchym Topol. The authors perceive the current geopolitical processes as an opportunity for improving the imagological methodology and imagology as an effective tool for interpreting the contemporary world.

The study deals with the thematisation of Jewishness in the inter-war prose writing of four authors from assimilated Jewish families: Richard Weiner (born 1884), František Langer (born 1888), Karel Poláček (born 1892) and Egon Hostovský (born 1908). Whereas the prose of the last-named author has received considerable attention in contemporary literary history, in the case of the remaining authors their Jewishness remains on the periphery of scholarly interest, or is mentioned in works of a synthetic character. A detailed reading of the work of all three prose writers reveals that for them Jewish culture did not represent an essential literary theme, and indeed they barely mentioned it whatsoever. An exception relates to the abundant references to anti-Semitism in Karel Poláček’s cycle of novels about the provincial town, which can be explained among other factors by the aggravated political situation in the second half of the 1930s.

In the Czech culture of the turn of the 20th century we can see the phenomenon of the orientalising of the Jewish populace, in which the archetype of the beautiful Jewess (la belle Juive) occupied a significant and somewhat different position. This study examines types of depiction of the beautiful Jewess in travelogues and fictional literature, and divides these tendencies into three types. The beautiful Jewess is construed by means of biblical similes and antecedents, while these often concern heavily eroticised representations that are not based on a biblical template but rather arise out of the imagination of the authors of the 19th century. The erotic subtext plays a fundamental role also in the case of the second tendency, though here the primary precursor is not a biblical figure or narrative, but the fictional character in the story rather represents a unique existence, without direct and determining intertextual ties. This type of beautiful Jewess is characterised by a significant borderline role between the Orient and the Occident, and at the same time in the narratives she also occupies the role of a tragic figure. The final tendency is to conceive the beautiful Jewess negatively, in which the narrative accentuates her use of her beauty in order to pursue her own selfish interests. Among other factors, the study examines modes of the orientalising of beautiful Jewesses, and reflects upon whether they concern positive or negative representations.

Philip Roth made no secret of his great admiration for the work of Franz Kafka, which ultimately brought him to Prague in the 1970s and fostered his interest in Czech culture. This contribution focuses on the reception of the personality and work of Franz Kafka in Philip Roth’s non-fiction writing. The first section focuses on Roth’s essential Kafkaesque essay ‘“I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting”; or Looking at Kafka’ from 1973, in which Roth combines an empathetic portrait of his favourite author with a counterfactual vision of Kafka’s life, in which the author of the Trial and the Castle did not die of tuberculosis and instead fled from the Holocaust to the United States, where he became Roth’s uncle. In the second section, based on Roth’s dialogue with Ivan Klíma from 1990, we document how Kafka serves Roth in his reflections on the position and role of the writer in society.

Was Ignác Cornova’s contribution to Czech-language literature only that of a historian? In the 1770s and 1780s he also happened to be the most acclaimed poet in Bohemia. Of the many reactions to Cornova’s work from German and Czech writers, this study focuses on Nábožné písně pro ka­tolického měšťana a sedláka k veřejným a domácím službám božím (Religious Songs for the Catholic Townsman and Countryman for Use in Public and Domestic Divine Service, 1791) by Václav Stach, with a verse dedication to Cornova. It emphasises that under the Habsburg monarchy the genre of religious songs and hymns was also a platform for forming a new readership and literary public, providing a ve- hicle for writers such as Michael Denis, Ignaz Cornova, Johann Peter Hofmann and Václav Stach himself for creative experimentation and a mutually beneficial communication of their work to the public. In this context, our study examines the conceptual and aesthetic links between Stach and the poetic models of Ignác Cornova.

The article proposes a hypothesis that traditional imagological concepts are no longer sufficient for interpreting the current and recent "imagological situation". The authors argue that given the significant changes in the geopolitical ordering of the world in the post-imperial period, it is necessary to expand and internally categorize the terms to capture a more nuanced way of looking at the "other". The article provides a summary of existing approaches and suggests innovations, particularly in making a careful distinction between the self-image of the internal and external, and the disaggregation of the "meta-image" into several layers. The authors point out that imagological research needs to consider that the ethnic identity of the recipient is not unambiguous, which problematizes the interrelation of "us" and "them". Additionally, in post-imperialism, there is an unravelling of the former bipolar perception. The authors trace the image in the context of concepts such as image, stereotype, and brand. The essay aims to analyse the manifestations of the emerging neo-imperialism, which returns to the traditional contrasting delineation of "our" and "the foreign". It also examines the factor of evaluation and the question of fictionality. The effectiveness of the new approaches is demonstrated in a Russian-Czech comparative analysis of selected novels by Vladimir Sorokin and Jáchym Topol. The authors perceive the current geopolitical processes as an opportunity for improving the imagological methodology and imagology as an effective tool for interpreting the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of silence to characterize the dominant response of occupied populations during the Second World War recurs throughout post-war European literature and is especially prominent in Czech writing. Interpreting the meaning of this silence therefore became central to Czech efforts to establish a preferred narrative about the German occupation in the immediate post-war period. Through analysis of the motif in more and less well-known works published between 1940 and 1946, I shall map the narrowing understanding of the silence of the occupied from its varied, ambiguous portrayal in the now forgotten first Czech novel about the Occupation, Silences by Josef Horal, to its unequivocal interpretation as resistance in Jan Drda's canonical The Mute Barricade. While this narrowing reflects Tony Judt's notion of a "collective amnesia" necessary for national unity and recovery, the marginalization of certain perspectives also presages the broader move in Czech post-war society away from pluralism to nationalist authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on cultural changes that the depiction of land cultivation in Czech ruralism literature (authors like Josef Knap, František Křelina, Václav Prokůpek, etc.) goes through in Modernism. It refers to the impact of political discourse and the influence of media – especially newspapers – at the time. The analysis points to the relevance of how traditionalist literature discourse incorporates modern approaches to agriculture and new modes of representation of the countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's theory of minor literature as a starting point, this article moves from their opposition of "major/minor" literatures to their "tetralinguistic" model of vernacular, vehicular, referential, and mythic language. it presents the work of the polyglot poet and Hasidic scholar Jiří Langer to offer a multifaceted view of three distinct contexts: the theoretical discourse of minor literature, the literary milieu of interwar Prague, and the history of gay Czech and Jewish writing. Langer appears in Franz Kafka's diaries and letters over a period of several years as a source of information on Jewish culture, as well as a personal contact to prominent rabbis from the east. Two decades later, langer produced his own remarkable work in Czech, Devĕt bran (Nine Gates, 1937), a popular-scholarly study of hasidic traditions based on his experience in the galician town of Belz. Much of what is known today about Jiří Langer's unconventional life comes from the memoirs of his brother František, published as a foreword for the english translation of the book. However, it was only in recent years that Langer's Hebrew poetry has also become available to English-speaking readers, revealing his linguistic strategies that draw on mystical traditions in the attempt to form a modern synthesis of Jewish homosexual identity. Jiří Langer's literary activity shows Prague as a site of self-definition through multilingualism, rather than the more familiar image of Kafka's "deterritorialization". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the history of Czech children’s and juvenile literature and its tradition in both national and European contexts. It examines foreign authors (French, German, Russian, English, American, and some others) and their works translated into Czech that played a significant role in the Czech literary scene. The rediscovery of Czech folklore in the 19th century coincides with the revival of the national culture and restitution of the language as reflected in fiction and poetry. The development of literature for children and youth owes much to translations. In the 19th century, Jules Verne was the must read for children and so was Antoine de Saint- Exupery in the 20th; his Little Prince has undergone multiple editions. The second part of the study examines contemporary children’s and juvenile literature by comparing the situation on the book market in France with that in Czech Republic. The analysis focuses on two novels for young people that present young characters who have to cope with different crises and help ill people they love (Céline Lavignette-Ammoun and Ivona Březinová). The essay’s conclusion, based on the polls among children and young people as well as on literary criticism, shows that neither the theme nor the approach of the authors or the preferences of the readers in the two countries considerably differ. This is due to the fact that juvenile literature knows no borders as it gives preference to the interplay of fantasy and imagination. What characterizes contemporary juvenile literature, however, is its openness to the hitherto tabooed themes as well as its interest in the relation between the sameness and the otherness.

Philip Roth made no secret of his great admiration for the work of Franz Kafka, which ultimately brought him to Prague in the 1970s and fostered his interest in Czech culture. This contribution focuses on the reception of the personality and work of Franz Kafka in Philip Roth's non-fiction writing. The first section focuses on Roth's essential Kafkaesque essay '"I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting"; or Looking at Kafka' from 1973, in which Roth combines an empathetic portrait of his favourite author with a counterfactual vision of Kafka's life, in which the author of the Trial and the Castle did not die of tuberculosis and instead fled from the Holocaust to the United States, where he became Roth's uncle. In the second section, based on Roth's dialogue with Ivan Klíma from 1990, we document how Kafka serves Roth in his reflections on the position and role of the writer in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study deals with the thematisation of Jewishness in the inter-war prose writing of four authors from assimilated Jewish families: Richard Weiner (born 1884), František Langer (born 1888), Karel Poláček (born 1892) and Egon Hostovský (born 1908). Whereas the prose of the last-named author has received considerable attention in contemporary literary history, in the case of the remaining authors their Jewishness remains on the periphery of scholarly interest, or is mentioned in works of a synthetic character. A detailed reading of the work of all three prose writers reveals that for them Jewish culture did not represent an essential literary theme, and indeed they barely mentioned it whatsoever. An exception relates to the abundant references to anti-Semitism in Karel Poláček's cycle of novels about the provincial town, which can be explained among other factors by the aggravated political situation in the second half of the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Czech culture of the turn of the 20th century we can see the phenomenon of the orientalising of the Jewish populace, in which the archetype of the beautiful Jewess (la belle Juive) occupied a significant and somewhat different position. This study examines types of depiction of the beautiful Jewess in travelogues and fictional literature, and divides these tendencies into three types. The beautiful Jewess is construed by means of biblical similes and antecedents, while these often concern heavily eroticised representations that are not based on a biblical template but rather arise out of the imagination of the authors of the 19th century. The erotic subtext plays a fundamental role also in the case of the second tendency, though here the primary precursor is not a biblical figure or narrative, but the fictional character in the story rather represents a unique existence, without direct and determining intertextual ties. This type of beautiful Jewess is characterised by a significant borderline role between the Orient and the Occident, and at the same time in the narratives she also occupies the role of a tragic figure. The final tendency is to conceive the beautiful Jewess negatively, in which the narrative accentuates her use of her beauty in order to pursue her own selfish interests. Among other factors, the study examines modes of the orientalising of beautiful Jewesses, and reflects upon whether they concern positive or negative representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amongst other female characters within the literary works of Bolesław Leśmian, we can fi nd the dziwożony (dreaded dryads) – demons from Slavic mythology inhabiting wetlands or forests, which are considered malicious and dangerous, because they kidnap newborn children and replace them with their own offspring. These characters were presented as wild women with long hair and breasts so saggy that they would use them as washing paddles. Analyzing literary texts from the 19th and early 20th centuries written by Polish authors (Seweryn Goszczyński, Michał Bałucki, Miron [Aleksander Michaux], Maria Konopnicka, Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer, Wiktor Gomulicki), Czech (Karel Jaromír Erben) and Russian writers (Konstantin Balmont), I would like to show how the representations of these female demons have changed over time and how Bolesław Leśmian stylized them in the poem “Dziwożona” and in the prose fragment “Podlasiak”, from the volume Klechdy Polskie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the six short stories that the Czech writer Jan Čep wrote during his exile in France, when he fled the new Czechoslovak communist regime after 1948. These texts are as follows: Les Tziganes [The Gypsies], which was written in French and published in the journal Terre humaine in 1952, Tajemství Kláry Bendové [The Secret of Klára Benda], Před zavřenými dveřmi [In Front of the Closed Door], Ostrov Ré [Ré Island], Květnové dni [Days of May], and Tři pocestní [Three Pilgrims]. These short stories are interesting for several reasons. First of all, they present a changing point in Čep’s themes, for they take place during the more recent events – the Second World War and the arrival to power of the communist regime, – and evoke a humanity who has been destroyed. The existential drama of the individual, which had previously been predominant in Čep’s work, is now extended to the entire human community. Fear has separated people from each other, and every genuine personal relation has become impossible. What’s more, language is incapable of bringing together human beings. True communication implies a form of silence, in which God can speak to the heart of man, and where the possibility of communion with the others still exists. At the same time, Čep’s characters have to face this recent history, which obliges them to make a choice, in particular as far as exile is concerned. As a consequence, a new form of anguish appears, and is superimposed on Čep’s original one. It gives rise to a feeling of guilt over those who stayed in Czechoslovakia, especially his mother, but also confronts Čep with the inability to write, since he doesn’t manage to find a publisher in France and can no longer write in Czech. As a “pilgrim on the earth”, he endures his suffering and the suffering of the world united to Christ, in communion with Him. Eventually, these later short stories represent a transition for Čep, and reveal that he accepts, as painful as this decision can be, to abandon fiction and to engage in the genre of essay, above all for Radio Free Europe. He will thus manage to give hope to people who suffer behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia, while expressing his intimate concerns in a very personal way.

Autofictions and memoirs about growing up in late socialism have proliferated in Czech as well as in other postsocialist Eastern European literatures. These retrospective texts are often tinged with nostalgia and infused with irony and humour. Two of the most popular texts of this genre in the Czech Republic are Irena Dousková’s autofictional books Hrdý Budžes [B. Proudew] and Oněgin byl Rusák [Onegin Was a Rusky]. The Czech author writes about growing-up in a non-conformist family dealing with everyday life in socialist Czechoslovakia. After discussing Dousková’s books as autofiction the article will take a closer look at the poetics of childhood autofictions and their contribution to cultures of remembering socialism in comparison to autobiographies. It will discuss the ways how writing about childhood creates a specific socialist identity through scarcity, ingenuity, and working with/against restraints and the way humour is used to transmit difficult memories.

This study clarifies the events that led to the appearance of the word 'robot' in world culture and shows the international reception of the work of Karel Čapek R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which caused a deep transformation of the robot into a mechanical anthropomorphic creature. All the author's texts dedicated to the topic are translated into Italian for the first time, and primary sources which testify the resonance that R.U.R. received in Italy have been republished.

The last two decades have seen a rising interest in the Holocaust and the expulsion of ethnic Germans after World War II in Czech literature. Novels by Hana Androníková, Radka Denemarková, Magdalena Platzová, Kateřina Tučková, and Jáchym Topol share a quest for a new poetics of remembrance. Informed by contemporary discussions about Czech memory politics, these novels are characterised by spectral visions of Germans and Jews alike, a dichotomy of trauma and nostalgia, and an understanding of Czech history as postcatastrophically entangled and thus calling for multidirectional forms of remembrance. In this respect, literary memorial forms compensate for the absence of other memorial forms addressing these topics through a transnational lens. The interaction of different historical points of view is achieved by a time frame extending from the war to the present day and stressing the intercultural dynamics of Czechs, Jews, and Germans retroactively. In order to illustrate this entanglement, authors make use of popular genres, such as romance, and create texts shaped by genre fluidity, memory theory, documentary practices, and concepts of transnationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Milada Blekastad (1917-2003) was a translator, writer, and university lecturer. She was born in Prague; however, she spent most of her life in Norway. She translated books from Czech to Norwegian and vice versa. Blekastad was also a scholar focusing on the work of Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670), a leading humanist, theologist, philosopher, and pedagog. Norway helped Blekastad to develop her full potential. In return, she worked hard to introduce Czech (or wider European) cultural values to Norway through her work. What circumstances shaped the mutually enriching relationship between Blekastad and the Norwegian intellectual, academic, and cultural environments? What drove her rising social trajectory? To answer these questions, one must look at the social fields she operated in, at her habitus, and at the cultural and economic capital she managed to turn into symbolic capital in a country that was not her homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses two art exhibitions in the context of Czech-Norwegian relations, presenting both the Czechoslovak book exhibition in Oslo (1937) and the Norwegian painting and applied art exhibition in Prague (1938) as important parts in a bilateral cultural dialogue. The promising initial communication in form of a mutual information exchange was soon disrupted by the beginning of World War II and post-war politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct Angelo Maria Ripellino's path as a scholar in the field of Czech literary historiography and criticism, focusing on the formation of his methodological approach as it is shown in the shaping and contents of his first book, the Storia della poesia ceca contemporanea ('The history of contemporary Czech poetry'; 1950). While writing this monograph, Ripellino could rely not only on his own remarkable knowledge of Czech culture, but also on the mentorship of prominent Czech scholars (among them Karel Teige and Jindřich Chalupecký), as is documented in the recently edited private correspondence between the Italian scholar and Czech writers and artists. Moreover, thanks to further materials from Ripellino's archive, it is possible to better grasp the scholar's 'avant-garde' understanding of literature and the arts, and thus his approach to their study and description. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the work of Taulero Zulberti as a translator and promoter of Czech literature. The story of Czech-Italian cultural exchange during the 1920s and 1930s, which was carried out in a variety of magazines and periodicals, is undoubtedly a relevant, even if secondary, topic. Yet it has received little attention in the context of Italian Slavistics. Zulberti, subsequently known for his work as a journalist, remains a practically unknown figure as mediator of Czech culture in Italy. This represents the first thorough survey of his extensive output, based on analysis of such magazines as Il Brennero, Il Secolo XX, and Le opere e i giorni. Zulberti's career is particularly significant as regards Josef and Karel Čapek, and it is through his translations that their stories first appeared to the Italian public. He would attentively follow their careers at least throughout the 1920s. The obscurity surrounding Zulberti's work is due in part to the kind of texts he published, preferring short pieces that rarely reached the size of a full-length article, with the unique exception of Karel Čapek's The Makropulos Affair, the author's first published volume in Italian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Czech translation of selected parts of The Second Sex was published in 1966. The Slovak translation, published in 1967, was nearly the complete text. Attitudes toward Beauvoir's feminism can be observed in two Czech academic journals (Sociologický časopis [Czech sociological review] and Filosofický časopis [Philosophical review]) and in a debate in Literární noviny (Literary review). The author focuses on the context of both translations and describes the reactions to the Czech translation both in the academy and by the general public. Résumé: La traduction tchèque de certaines parties du Deuxième Sexe date de 1966. La traduction slovaque (1967) était quant à elle presque complète. Les réactions au féminisme de Beauvoir peuvent être observées dans deux revues scientifiques tchèques (Sociologický časopis [Revue sociologique tchèque] et Filosofický časopis [Revue philosophique]) et dans la polémique qui a éclaté au sein de la revue Literární noviny (Revue littéraire). L' auteure se concentre sur le contexte des deux traductions et décrit la réception de la traduction tchèque par le milieu universitaire et par le grand public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Porównania / Comparisons. A Journal on Comparative Literature & Interdisciplinary Studies is the property of Adam Mickiewicz University Poznao, Press of "Poznanskie Studia Polonistyczne" and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Porównania / Comparisons. A Journal on Comparative Literature & Interdisciplinary Studies is the property of Adam Mickiewicz University Poznao, Press of "Poznanskie Studia Polonistyczne" and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Porównania / Comparisons. A Journal on Comparative Literature & Interdisciplinary Studies is the property of Adam Mickiewicz University Poznao, Press of "Poznanskie Studia Polonistyczne" and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)