Liverpool University Press Literary Universe in Three Parts: Language - Fiction - Experience

For decades, the Prague School Structuralism assumption of textual autonomy dominated the explorations of Czech literature as well as the context of Czech literary theory. The three authors of this book combined their efforts to move beyond and offer a new conceptual frame. Sharing the structuralist proposition of texts made from words, they focus on the metamorphoses of the modes of representations through the 20th century fiction and its critical reflections. Switching between theoretical considerations and case study interpretations, their essays challenge the notion of autonomous fictional worlds and involve the pragmatic categories of the constructed image of a writer and the aesthetic experience of a reader. The focus on representational status of literary texts combines here with another conceptual frame the performative aspect. The literary texts do not function as mere documents that preserve the traces of existing reality but as objects that construct what their readers conceive as parts of existing reality. Instead of a a depository of meanings, literature is thus perceived as a permanent process of negotiations that uses the institutional power of canonisation, ritualisation or tabooisation. Drawing on contemporary international theory of literature and aesthetics (Searle, Rorty, Davidson, Iser, Greenblatt, White), the authors try to conflate semiotic analyses of textual meanings with the pragmatic notions of historical and readership contexts. The book does not offer a coherent narrative of modern Czech literature development. It chooses the productive texts of Czech literature, occasionally combined with other items of Czech culture (arts, films, TV production) and brings them into comparison with the international context. Such an approach puts aside the traditional assumption of a national context as a major defining criterion, which allows the authors to articulate more generalized abstractions.