Search

The article focuses on the poems of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin which he wrote after his release from the clinic, i.e. between 1807 and 1820. The author attempts to show that the texts which he places in the first period of Hölderlin's tower production, differ in form and content both from the work produced before his hospitalization and from the poems written later in the tower. While the external conditions of the poet's life did not change, his texts did, but this fact has not been satisfactorily elucidated yet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to better understand the authorial figure of Vladislav Vančura by reconstructing the critical and literary-historical image conveyed to us by the reception of the writer during his lifetime, starting with the writer's first short story collections and finishing with his Obrazy z dějin národa českého ('Images from the history of the Czech nation'). Loosely following on the theoretical bases of previous discussions, which in various ways conceptualize the effect of the 'name of the author' in relation to his work (Foucault, Bourdieu, Russian formalism, Mukařovský), this study examines Vančura's literary output through the lens of its author (as a constructed figure and category), especially in terms of the author function as it serves to form this output into a unified whole. It deals with changes in the name of the author mainly in relation to Vančura's reception. During the interwar period the critical reception captured the creative phenomenon of the writer in the course of his development, at a moment when his extreme style and language caused numerous controversies which grew into open polemics. While these revolved primarily around the issue of aesthetics (in the case of Pole orná a válečná and Poslední soud), they involved broader worldview and ideological issues (as with the novel Tři řeky). Vančura's persistent search for a narrative form repeatedly compelled critics and interpreters of his time to reassess the criteria and critical standards for literature. This study traces the transformations of the author's image in this context all through his life as it assumed countless 'faces', subverting the traditional assumption of coherence in Vančura's literary output that the concept of the author was meant to guarantee, and thus demonstrating -- given the failure of this concept to bring about such coherence -- how it is necessary to look instead for those places of incoherence, contradiction, and disparity. To this end, the study does not seek to cover the history of Vančura's reception in all its facets but to trace those significant moments when the image of the author and his work was transformed, challenging unequivocal interpretations and defying the interpretative stereotypes and schemes into which it has so often been confined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing its methodological inspiration from A History of New Modernism. Czech Literature, 1905–1923 (2010), this study aims to present the development of Czech literature over the course of a single year: 1929. The objective, however, is not to portray the literary events and literary production of this year in the manner of a chronicle, nor in their entirety, but to capture certain ‘nodal’ characteristics of the imagination and literary language. There is one event that allows the author to take this approach — i.e. to identify themes, images and figures that are typical of the artistic discourse of the period —, namely the publication of Richard Weiner’s The Barber-Surgeon. The themes, motives, and figures found in this text (dream and dream writing, language, failure, literary polemics) constitute a point of departure for grasping the dominant features of a literary period which is otherwise rather amorphous. By virtue of Weiner’s poetics, a thread of sense begins to emerge, and eventually the ‘story’ or ‘drama’ of 1929, out of the re-constructed configurations and correlations of several different literary texts. Through its ‘otherness’, Weiner’s ‘dream poetics’ separated itself from the universalizing aesthetic concept of its time, thus falling ‘out of the picture’ from the perspective of literary history. By contrast, the author considers it as the central feature of a network of relations among a number of texts published in 1929: the short story AM from Jakub Deml’s collection My Purgatory; the poem The New Icarus by Konstantin Biebl; Karel Čapek’s Tales from Two Pockets; Jaroslav Durych’s essay on Poetics; and Vladislav Vančura’s novel The Last Judgement. The themes and figures under consideration here — poetics, dreams, dream writing and literary polemics — are all related to the writer’s self-consciousness in the creative process and the attention paid by the writer to material elements of the work. This manifests itself as an interest in the question of poetics and in a vivid ‘linguistic awareness’, which is also manifested in the widespread interest in questions of language and the culture of language that Czech linguists, especially those associated with the Prague Linguistic Circle, studied in accordance with — and in dialogue with — contemporary trends in modern art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study intends to investigate the relations between Philip Sidney and the continental intellectual circle (mainly that of Protestant scholars and aristocrats) on the basis of Sidney's correspondence. The study is focused especially on the Czech cultural milieu. Sidney's „grand tour“ over continent is crucial for the formation of his concept of poetry. The poesy is, against Sidney, among all forms of learning the best suited to move the soul to virtue through the beautiful and delightful images of moral example, playing its important role in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution characterises the poetics of the last four novels written by Milan Kundera (Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, The Festival of Insignificance). Despite certain differences the author of the essay particularly pays attention to elements in which "the French series" follows the poetics of the novels written in Czech (existential theme, sarcastic humour etc.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text provides a commentary regarding Ferdinand de Saussure's research in anagrammatic poetry. The author first describes three phases of Saussure's research (1906-1907, 1907-1908, 1908-1909) and explains various changes in his approach. Secondly, the author introduces the main tendencies in reception of Saussure's "anagrammatic work" (Tel Quel, linguistics, psychoanalysis). Finally, a comparison is drawn between Saussure's analysis of anagrams and his Course in General Linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]