Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros31Dossier Université Invitée : PragueDoctoral Research at the Departme...

Dossier Université Invitée : Prague

Doctoral Research at the Department of Czech and Comparative Literature at Charles University in Prague

Josef Šebek et Josef Hrdlička

Texte intégral

1The prehistory of comparative literary studies in the Czech Lands dates back at least to the end of the 18th century, in particular to the figure of the Slavic philologist Josef Dobrovský. Comparative literature began to be taught as a discipline at Charles University in 1893, when the poet, translator and essayist Jaroslav Vrchlický was appointed the first professor of Western European comparative literature at the Faculty of Arts. The field was strongly linked to Romance studies. In 1916 the most important Czech literary critic of the 20th century, F. X. Šalda, became the key scholar of comparative literature at the faculty, followed later by another significant figure of Czech culture, Václav Černý, though he only taught there from 1945 to 1950, when he was removed by the Communist regime (he was allowed to return briefly between December 1968 and January 1970). In 1993, after the end of state socialism, the Centre for Comparative Literature was re-established by a group of outstanding figures in Chinese, French, Spanish, German, English, and Russian philology of the older and middle generation, whose spiritus agens was the Sinologist Oldřich Král. Since 2005, comparative literature has been part of the Department of Czech and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Arts.

2Comparative literature at Charles University currently offers both master’s and doctoral study programmes, and reflects both the rich historical tradition of this constantly redefined discipline and its contemporary developments on a European and global scale. The research focus of the teaching staff lies mainly in the theory of the lyric, international avant-garde, mediality of literature, narratology, ecocriticism, sociology of literature and discourse analysis, queer studies, history of ideas – especially with regard to 20th century structuralism –, and Central European literatures. Teachers and PhD students develop rich international collaborations within various scholarly networks and regularly participate in world and European comparatist congresses (ICLA, ESCL). The study programme aims to cover the spectrum of comparative literature topics from historical as well as theoretical perspectives.

3The Department hosts the editorial board of the journal Svět literatury (World of Literature, published since 1991), which is the main publishing platform for comparative literature in the Czech Republic, and runs articles in multiple languages. The editorial team of the journal Plav, a monthly revue published since 2005 as successor to the widely read (but now defunct) journal Světová literatura (World Literature, 1956-1996), is mainly composed of MA and PhD students in the field of comparative literature, and offers thematic issues devoted to contemporary literature of all languages and continents.

4The topics of PhD theses written in comparative literature at Charles University reflect the breadth of contemporary comparative literature as a scholarly field. Among the most often addressed thematic clusters are, for example, various aspects of lyric poetry, memory and trauma, self-writing, and the history of literary theory. The present “Dossier Université invitée” of TRANS-. Revue de littérature générale et comparée attests to this breadth of academic interests, featuring six articles by PhD students at various stages of their doctoral studies. We have not focused the selection in any narrowly thematic way, but several substantial thematic and methodological links and interconnections clearly emerge among the texts.

5The first two contributions focus on different aspects of lyric poetry. In her study “Le temps et l’espace sur la page : comment lire la poésie concrete” [Time and space on the page: How to read concrete poetry], Julie Koblížková Wittlichová critically confronts the tendency to conceptualize modern poetry primarily with emphasis on its spatial dimension, a tendency that is even more pronounced in the case of concrete poetry. As the author demonstrates, applying Meir Sternberg’s narratological theory to lyric, it is the temporal dimension of the text as well as of the act of reading that is crucial to the reception of a work of concrete and experimental poetry, even in poems that are strongly oriented towards pictorial perception. Koblížková Wittlichová exemplifies this feature in her readings of poems by the classics of concrete and visual poetry: Pierre and Ilse Garnier, Ernst Jandl, Gerhard Rühm, Emil Juliš, and Jean-François Bory.

6A comparative reading of the work of two poets – Ilya Kaminsky, a Ukrainian naturalized in the United States, and the Russian underground experimental author Pavel Ulitin – is the subject of Anton Romanenko’s article “To Say is to Show: Translingualism and Multimodality in Ilya Kaminsky and Pavel Ulitin”. He focuses on how the work of each author uses a variety of languages, including sign language in Kaminsky’s case, and how, in relation to this, they employ multimodal means with an overall tendency towards visuality. Romanenko then argues that the very translingual character of texts tends towards the multimodal mode of poetic expression.

7Anna Schubertová’s doctoral dissertation deals with theoretical debates on realism in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her article focuses on an important moment of these debates: the divergence between the conception of realism in Georg Lukács, who has once more become a central figure in thinking about the Realist novel, and the theories of the Russian Formalists. In her text, entitled “Historicizing the Realism Controversy: Lukács, Russian Formalism, and the Two Models of Modern Narrative Form”, the act of “historicizing” consists not only in a critical reading of the theory and interpretive practice of Lukács and the Formalists, but more importantly in situating both approaches within the historical framework of the development of literary criticism through the concept of the “modes of relevance” proposed by Galin Tihanov, and the contrast between endogenous and constructivist conceptions of form theorized by David Wellbery.

8In the study “La littérature française dans les manuels scolaires tchèques. La construction de l’image de François Villon” [French literature in Czech textbooks: The construction of François Villon’s image] Eliška Härtelová has undertaken a detailed survey of narratives about the “life and writings” of François Villon using a representative corpus of Czech high school textbooks. These often understand the poet not as a Medieval but as a Renaissance author, and generally practice a rather straightforward biographical reading of his poetry. They portray Villon anachronistically either as a psychologically fractured being or as a revolutionary fighting against the medieval order. As the author demonstrates, these readings emerged in the literature on Villon already in the last third of the nineteenth century and in the didactic contexts they show considerable persistence. The perception of the poet as a “revolutionary” dominated especially in the era of the Communist regime (1948-1989), but it already had a foothold in the Liberated Theatre’s mid-1930s revue The Rag Ballad based on a simplified image of Villon.

9The study “Time Between Then and Now: Temporality in Pathographies and Thanatographies” focuses on specific genres of self-writing: autobiographical/autofictional writing about one’s own illness in pathography, and the various forms of literary recording of the death of a close person in thanatography. The author of the study, Jan Musil, shows how, although very similar in some texts, the two genres differ in their structure and temporality, which he understands in terms of the opposition between the Greek concepts of chronos and kairos. The case study on which the author demonstrates his understanding of the difference between pathography and thanatography is the text Čas mezi tehdy a teď [The time between then and now, 2004] by the Czech translator and author Bohumila Grögerová about her long-time partner, the poet Josef Hiršal, in the final period of his life. With this and other prose pieces, Grögerová places herself among thanatographers such as Peter Handke and Friederike Mayröcker, who, alongside others, are the subject of Jan Musil’s doctoral dissertation.

10The last study also deals with the genre of self-writing. In the article “The Eyes of Dog and Man Collided: Animals in Ota Pavel’s The Death of Beautiful Roe Deer”, Valentýna Žišková interprets the short story collection of the still very popular and widely translated Czech author. Two themes dominate this book: the relationship between man and animals (and nature in general), and the fate of the Jewish population in Czechoslovakia during World War II. From the perspective of animal studies, Pavel’s stories exhibit many “traditional” motifs and situations, such as the iconic eye-to-eye gaze (a subject on which Jacques Derrida and others have written). At the same time, animals are often endowed with a distinctive agency, notwithstanding the fact that many stories in the collection revolve around hunting. As Žišková shows, it is especially the relationship between nonhuman beings and the situation of the Jews which is represented in a surprisingly complex way in Pavel’s prose work.

11The collection of texts authored by PhD students at the Department of Czech and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague could not have been published without those who took on the task of attentively editing the texts: our excellent long-time collaborators, Peter Gaffney (English) and Benoît Meunier (French), as well as our colleagues Martina Mecco (Italian), and Hernán Maltz (Spanish).

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Josef Šebek et Josef Hrdlička, « Doctoral Research at the Department of Czech and Comparative Literature at Charles University in Prague »TRANS- [En ligne], 31 | 2025, mis en ligne le 04 avril 2025, consulté le 12 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/trans/12897 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13k9k

Haut de page

Auteurs

Josef Šebek

Department of Czech and Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts, Charles University

josef.sebek@ff.cuni.cz

https://uclk.ff.cuni.cz/komparatistika/vyucujici-na-oboru-komparatistika/

Josef Hrdlička

Department of Czech and Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts, Charles University

josef.hrdlicka@ff.cuni.cz

https://uclk.ff.cuni.cz/komparatistika/vyucujici-na-oboru-komparatistika/

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search