Czech Literature of the 1st half of the 20th Century

Lectures and seminars on Czech literature from modernism to the end of the Second World War (ca. 1890-1945) are aimed at learning about and understanding the fundamental rules of literary development in the period under consideration. The emphasis will be on the chronological presentation of individual periods, artistic movements and groups or modifications of literary genres, thus focusing on the variability of the system of aesthetic values and norms, which were included in the works of representatives of individual literary generations that significantly influenced literary life. The aim of dealing with individual periods is also to explain the basic concepts of this period, such as modernism, avant-garde or Catholic literature and their placement in the context of European and world literature. The initial theses are confirmed with interpretations of selected literary texts, as well as their reception and evaluation in contemporary criticism; we present and explain them with a rich material of discussions and polemics, which after 1918 were motivated mainly from ideological points of view. It is these conflicts, which have taken place between individuals and entire generations, that best present to us the various concepts of artistic creation.

Lecture topics:
1. Manifest of Czech Modernism and its fundamental contribution to the development of Czech literature and art in general.
2. Images of Czech naturalism and its "second life" in the prose of the 1920s.
3. So-called rebellious generation and the prose of its representatives. Viktor Dyk and Fraňa Šrámek.
4. Problematization of identity in Richard Weiner's prose texts.
5. Genesis and composition of Hašek's Švejk.
6. Avant-garde in Czech literature, similarities and differences between the artistic associations Devětsil and Literární skupina.
7. Čapek's noetic trilogy and its place in the author's philosophical and social thinking.
8. Vančura's conception of artistic creation in the context of historical prose.
9. Olbracht's interest for Subcarpathian Russia and its thematization in prose between the two wars.
10. A new type of psychological prose in the novels of Jaroslav Havlíček and Václav Řezáč.
11. Themes of Judaism in the texts of "assimilated" Jews: Egon Hostovský, Karel Poláček.
12. The situation in Czech literature during the Protectorate, the emergence of a new generation after 1940 and its differentiation.