Problémy interkulturní komparatistiky: Komparativní myšlení – pojmy – interpretační sondy
Authors:   University of West Bohemia, Kučera Petr 
Published: December 2023

The present monograph examines the phenomena of strangers and others as a key issue in comparative thinking about literature and art, which seeks to overcome static and schematicity in the approach to works of art created in different national cultures. The starting point is the concept of literary and artistic communication as a non-linear and non-causal dialogical process, whose relationship to social communication is largely ambivalent: on the one hand it is part of it, on the other it represents a certain alternative to established display and expression mechanisms – prevailing language norms and social conventions more or less disrupts and promotes a different hierarchy of values and the associated different conceptions of humanity. The introductory chapter follows some of the paths leading to the constitution of interculturally oriented literary comparative studies, whose dialogue with intercultural philosophy is based on the rejection of cultural hegemony of large national cultures over small cultures, older traditions over younger traditions, but also determining the role of one-way waves of civilization. Closer attention is paid to the Central European cultural space, in which from the end of the 19th century to World War II the international debate on fundamental philosophical, linguistic, literary theoretical and artistic issues. The following chapter maps the thought movement that philosophical concepts of difference sparked in the 20th century. These concepts come mostly from a multilingual environment in which diverse cultural and religious traditions clash, and so the way they ask questions is unusual and revealing. A comparative study of literature, which was burdened by the tendency to scientific systemization and unambiguous cataloging of complex cultural phenomena, acquires a new dimension of living, critical and dialogical thinking through contact with the ideas of philosophies of difference and dialogue. In this chapter, more attention is also paid to the contribution of Czech philosophers, as well as contemporary researchers studying West-East relations. The chapter devoted to the issue of literary trends deals with the axiological, genological and poetological problems of modernism and postmodernism, especially in Western and Central Europe. The presented analyzes draw attention to the complexity and ambiguity of the phenomena of modernism and postmodernism, whose specific artistic manifestations are characterized by a high degree of ideological and stylistic heterogeneity. The subchapter focused on the issue of symbolism examines the poetological characteristics of the poetic creation of European symbolism, but also the articulation of new attitudes to life. The work of Western European symbolists, based on the sensibility of the big city, is contrasted with the poetic search for Central European symbolists, who combine expressive experiments with the reflection of the disappearance of the natural, unique, soulful, fragile, weak, ie. everything that hinders the victorious onset of a new era. The subchapter on the paradoxes of Central European postmodernism seeks an approach to the literary texts of Central European authors that avoids, on the one hand, the adoration of postmodernist experiments, on the other hand, their traditionalist trivialization or even rejection. Examples from prose from the period of the 1980s in particular show the analogous direction of Western and Central European authors who strive for an artistic picture of the crisis of contemporary European civilization. Interpretive probes of West-East relations look at cultural dialogue and its manifestations in the works of authors from the crossroads of several cultures, whose intercultural sensitivity goes hand in hand with depth of thought and artistic originality, from various angles and periods (from the beginnings of modernism to postmodern creation of the present). The subchapter interpreting Franz Kafka‘s The Metamorphosis weakens the hypertrophied autobiographical aspect of Kafka‘s prose interpretations in favor of a view of an ambiguous text that takes into account more general symbolic meanings such as rising cold in interpersonal relationships, dehumanization of everyday stereotypes and perceptions of otherness as unacceptable anomalies. The offered interpretation does so with the knowledge that Kafka‘s provocative dialogue with the reader ironically admits other meanings as well. The subchapter dealing with the novel Nevsky prospekt by N. V. Gogol notes both the ironic manifestations of national Russian and German stereotypes in the prose from Gogol‘s St. Petersburg short stories, as well as the remarkable dialogue of the text, which does not lead to the establishment of one basic meaning, but rather creates an unstable, floating semantic background, which constantly provokes the reader to the changes of the original position. The subchapter devoted to Hermann Hesse‘s Indian prose traces the writer‘s oscillation between Western European, Indian and Chinese spiritual and ethical values, which the author conveyed in the prose Siddhartha as a sensory experience in various language levels, compositionally, but also spiritually. The subchapter analyzing aspects of interculturality in the novel by Orhan Pamuk Snow presents the Turkish novelist in the coordinates of European and Oriental cultural tradition. The entanglement of Western and Eastern, secularized and orthodox religious, intellectual and emotional, individual and gender views is seen as an intercultural dialogue, which is characterized by the intertwining of ethical and aesthetic norms, as well as the shift of cultural boundaries. The translation-oriented chapter compares significantly different concepts of translating R. M. Rilke‘s poetry of a mature creative period as an autonomous manifestation of intercultural artistic communication. At the same time, the specific contribution to the practice of translating modern reflexive and metaphysical poetry is an as yet underappreciated contribution to a more comprehensive interpretation of Rilke‘s supreme poetic work. The chapter devoted to the xenological problems reflects the most serious threat to humanistic traditions to date, the culmination of millennial anti-Semitism in the form of the Holocaust organized by the German Nazi regime and its European allies. Anti-Semitic strategies are seen in the broader cultural, political and socio-historical context as a constant threat that must be addressed in each generation. The intellectual and ethical failure in German society in the 1930s led to the worst genocide in history, unleashed further massive waves of organized violence and destroyed, among other things, very valuable intercultural dialogue in Central Europe. The chapter on some problems of Catholic poetry in the Czech-Slovak context, which is important for understanding the complex personality of the Slovak Catholic poet and priest Rudolf Dilong. At the center of attention are the personalities of modern Czech Catholic poetry, especially Jakub Deml, Jan Zahradníček and Bohuslav Reynek, who in a different way enriched the relatively unilateral Catholic poetry. Catholic modernity in the Czech literature remained – despite proclamations – still largely subject to normative and didactic creation of the nineteenth century. In parallel with the Catholic poets, wrote the avant-garde interwar authors, whose works inspired Rudolf Dilong to remarkable experiments, but the Slovak poet accented Christian values in the habit of avant-garde poetry. The imagological chapter analyzes the characters of the Germans in the works of contemporary Czech prose, focusing mainly on the novels of middle and younger writers: Radka Denemarková Money from Hitler (2006), The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch (2009) by Kateřina Tučková and the novel by Germans (2012) by Jakub Katalpa as an attempt at a new perspective on the life of German-speaking people from the interwar period, through the expulsion and subsequent expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia, to problems with the confiscation of confiscated property after 1989. The final chapter focuses on the issue of intermedia comparative studies – it analyzes selected topics of the relationship between literary language and film speech both in terms of literary and film aesthetics, and in the context of the Central European cultural area. At the forefront of attention is the Czech prose of the 1960s and the new wave of Czechoslovak film.