ÚSILIE O AUTORSKÚ OSOBITNOSŤ V KONTEXTE TRADÍCIE ŽÁNRU (JÁN ČAJAK: RODINA ROVESNÝCH)

• Authors: Dana Hučková

Title variants

EN

The efforts to achieve authorial originality in the context of the genre tradition (Ján Čajak: The Rovesný Family)

• Languages of publication: SK

Abstracts

EN

Ján Čajak´s novel The Rovesný Family (1909) was consciously composed as a work set in the present. It widely responded to the current problems of that time but in a way it also took account of the contemporary readers´ preferences and literary genre patterns. Within the framework of the contemporary genre range it employs three types of narrative with three different types of topics/motifs: 1. the ideological narrative (the situation of the national education system in the Hungarian Empire after adopting the school, so called Appony´s laws in the year 1906, in the inter-ethnic relationship Hungarians – Slovaks), 2. the national narrative (national movements: the renegades versus the nationally aware – as an internal problem of the national community) and 3. the strait narrative (love and personal, partnership problems). Each of the narratives has a different modality (radical criticism – schematism – sentimentalism) and a different extent of employing the reality, ideality and fiction (realism/documentarism – idealism – fictiousness/literariness). At the same time the narrations in question fall into three genre patterns: 1. the political novel (realistic depiction of the situation in the national education system full of disillusion having a tragic ending), 2. the initiation novel (containing obvious utopian features, initiation of a young person into the national struggle and inflaming him/her for the national issues in utopian ideal world), 3. the romance (sentimental) novel (accenting the partners´ different ethnicity and social inequality, alternatively similarity of their national beliefs and economic independence and equality of each of the partners). Differentiating between the individual layers discloses the discourse status in Čajak´s prose, demonstrating the stylistic disparity of the individual storylines. The author´s ideological solution lies in questioning the passive approach and celebrating the activity regardless of nationality and moral credit.

Keywords

EN

LITERARY REALISM; SOCIAL NOVEL; GENRE; IDEOLOGY; NATIONAL LITERATURE; NATURALISM; ČAJAK JÁN

• Publisher: Institute of Slovak Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slovenská literatúra (Slovak Literature)
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 59
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 217 – 229

Contributors

author

Dana Hučková

• Ústav slovenskej literatúry SAV, Konventná 13, 813 64 Bratislava, Slovak Republic