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Department for Research into Literary Culture
This Department was set up on 1.1.2003 with the long-term policy aim of establishing and systematically developing research at lower levels into 19th and 20th century Czech literature (popular literature, entertaining fiction and ideologically-inspired instructive fiction), at the same time developing research into literary life and the institutional, cultural and social framework of Czech literature during that period. The workload of the Department combines areas traditionally associated with literary history and literary sociology. Within a short time-frame (to 2005) the general objectives of the Department consist in several interconnected individual research tasks involving two subject areas. For the first area (popular literature in the broadest sense of the word), the common factor consists in basic historical-bibliographical, literary-historical and sociological research into entertaining prose published in periodicals, which has hitherto been little known despite its key position at lower levels of literary communication. For the second area (literary life), the connection between individual projects can be characterized as involving research into the sensitive areas of 20th century literary life (the Second Republic and the 1950s), periods when the institutional, cultural and political environment had a special, extraordinary effect on literary communication.On 13th and 14th October 2004, the Department arranged a symposium entitled The Story, the Novel and the Periodical Press in the 19th and 20th Century (report on the symposium from ČL 2004, No. 6. The collection of papers is published in 2005 in the Institute's K. Series.
On 13th and 14th October 2005, the Department is preparing an associated symposium on Literary Life in the Sensitive Periods of 19th and 20th Century Czech History (planned).
Members of the Department teach at Charles University Philosophical Faculty.
Members
PhDr. Blanka HemelíkováIng. Pavel Janáček, Ph.D. - chief
Mgr. Michal Jareš
PhDr. Lenka Kusáková
Mgr. Tomáš Pavlíček
Mgr. Petr Šámal
PhDr. Aleš Zach
Projects
Pavel Janáček: Trash Literature. Operation of Exclusion, Operation of Replacement, 1938-1951 (Brno, Host 2004)- This monograph deals with the representation, rejection and censorship of popular literature in modern Czech culture (during the 19th and 20th centuries), as well as the parallel processes of replacement of rejected forms of literary communication by other forms which were more desirable from the standpoint of the cultural elites. It focuses most attention on the period from 1938 to 1951. In contrast to the immediately preceding trends of the First Republic, this period saw the promotion of a conservative conception of national literature, reserving all the space of literature for fiction which always kept the horizon of artistic values in view. The apocalyptical-sounding public discussion under the Second Republic (1938-1939) and the first stage of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (1939-1942) voiced the predominant opinion that popular literature was harmful both to the individual reader and the national culture as a whole, and the idea was formulated of keeping it under the control of systematic censorship. This idea started to be generally promoted after 1945 and popular literature of the period was suppressed by means of censorship.
- The subject of this monograph is thus the problematic reception of popular literature as one of the key elements in literary culture, the historical arc of its reception and the "narrative" of the bearing of Czech literary culture towards popular literature, culminating in the early 1950s in the construction of "Socialist literature", which in this monograph is understood to cover literature in the period from 1948 to 1989 with all its programmatic and institutional peculiarities. "Socialist literature" came into being through a reduction of the literary culture which had formed over the centuries with a combination and synthesis of both of its key elements, which had previously been disparate despite all overlaps. This reduction is conceived within this monograph to be an operation of exclusion and a synthesis or combination like an operation of replacement.
- The historical chapters of the monograph focus on the course of this two-in-one operation of exclusion and replacement in the crucial period before the middle of the 20th century. The substantive section is preceded in the monograph by the introductory historical-theoretical section. This chapter sets out the actual concept of censorship as an institution which imposes official limits on the space of literature as promoted by ruling cultural elites; it espouses the concept of the space of literature as a horizontally and vertically differentiated structure, as promoted by the pioneering work of Prague School authors. It also indicates where the operation of exclusion/replacement project came from and when, how and from what it was composed before it was seized upon by the cultural policy of the Second Republic, the Protectorate, the post-1945 and the post-1948 regimes. The introductory chapter seeks far deeper for the roots of this massive operation on the entire space of literature. It sees this operation as the culmination of long-term trends, which are by no means only present in Czech culture. It also states that the attempt to perform this operation amounted just as much to a denial of one defining trend in modern literary culture as the culmination of another defining trend.