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EN
This study re-examines the existing scholarship on Josef Holeček’s seminal multi-volume novel Naši. In the first part, it considers various approaches to Naši over the course of more than a century of literary scholarship on Holeček’s work. In this context, it also seeks to clarify and correct interpretations of its protagonist, the peasant Kojan, thus revealing productive antinomies that effectively disrupt the predominately monumentalizing conceptions that have characterized this scholarship to date. Finally, it considers Holeček’s Naši within the scope of various literary -isms and traditions, drawing from the new pluralistic model of poetics for the Czech prose on which this study is based.
EN
This article focuses on ‘Josefína Rykrová’s Autobiography’ (‘Vlastní životopis Josefíny Rykrové’) by Milada Součková, dealing in particular with issues related to the motif of memory in the form of labyrinthine prose. The collection of texts that is the subject of this analysis presents a retrospective narration based on the memories of Josefína Rykrová (although it makes multiple references to the biography of Milada Součková). Of particular importance is the fact that, at various times in the text, the subject position is split, suggesting a certain play with identities. Having created the figure of Josefína Rykrová, the author points to the splitting and loss of the self in the memories of others, which in turn become part of one’s own memory. Josefína, the titular heroine and the author of the memoirs, gets to know herself not only through her mother’s stories, but also through photographs. In this case, she draws from descriptions written on the back of the photos as an additional source of information. Součková shapes her text on the basis of an architectural metaphor of memory: the labyrinth. Moving towards the centre of this labyrinth is a complex process of remembering and erasing the traces of the past. The reconstruction of memories is aimed at reaching the first memory which remains entirely untainted. In this labyrinth, it is impossible to find the truth about oneself, yet the multiplicity of voices and images causes the subject to lose any certainty about this ‘self ’. Any certainty regarding the ontological status of the narrator is thus also lost by the reader. The labyrinth of the text, even though it uncovers the reality of intimate memories, never creates any intimate space for the subject, because it is interrupted by other voices — quotes, interjections, comments. Going through the labyrinth of memory is a symbolic attempt to confront one’s own identity and determine who one is.
EN
The study primarily deals with Lubomír Doležel‘s latest book, Heterocosmica II: Fictional Worlds of Postmodern Czech Prose — its main aim is not only to analyse and describe Doležel‘s newest contribution to the investigation of the theory of postmodern literature but also to compare the methodological preconditions of his approach to this type of literature with other crucial approaches. Therefore, the crucial theses of his system of postmodern literature are critically compared with those of the approaches of Linda Hutcheon, Brian McHale, and David Lodge.
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