Although they were probably among the most cosmopolitan of British literary couples, Willa and Ed... more Although they were probably among the most cosmopolitan of British literary couples, Willa and Edwin Muir's greatest fame arguably came from their jointly credited translations of Franz Kafka. Edwin Muir's reputation as one of the major poets of the interwar Scottish Literary Renaissance long overshadowed that of his wife as a novelist, but more recently a number of literary scholars have worked to bring greater attention to Willa's work, including Kirsty Allen and Aileen Christianson. The late scholar and editor Margery Palmer McCulloch from the University of Glasgow, who discussed both Willa and Edwin in considerable detail in her monograph Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange (2009) devoted the last several years of her life to a joint biography of the Muirs, leaving a full but unrevised draft when she died in 2019. Thanks to the editing work of Roderick Watson, the book was recently published by Oxford University Press, offering the first genuinely balanced account of the mutual influence these two distinctive figures had on each other's life and work. While both of them published autobiographies (Edwin in 1954 and Willa in 1968), and much of the material has been covered by previous scholars, this study is particularly useful for its detailed analysis of both Muirs' relationship to Prague and the Czechs.
This article provides an overview of the most important works on Slovak literature by the leading... more This article provides an overview of the most important works on Slovak literature by the leading British scholar in the field, the late Robert B. Pynsent, from his edited collection Modern Slovak Prose (1990) to his afterword for the translation of Ján Johanides’s But Crime Does Punish (2022). His themes range from nationalism in 19th-century writers to the ironization of sexuality in the post-1989 generation, for whom he coined his own term, the “Genitalists”.
Taking Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of minor literature as a starting point, this a... more Taking Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of minor literature as a starting point, this article moves from their opposition of “major/minor” literatures to their “tetralinguistic” model of vernacular, vehicular, referential, and mythic language. It presents the work of the polyglot poet and Hasidic scholar Jiří Langer to offer a multifaceted view of three distinct contexts: the theoretical discourse of minor literature, the literary milieu of interwar Prague, and the history of gay Czech and Jewish writing. Langer appears in Franz Kafka ’s diaries and letters over a period of several years as a source of information on Jewish culture, as well as a personal contact to prominent rabbis from the east. Two decades later, Langer produced his own remarkable work in Czech, Devĕt bran (Nine Gates, 1937), a popular-scholarly study of Hasidic traditions based on his experience in the Galician town of Belz. Much of what is known today about Jiří Langer’s unconventional life comes from the memoirs of his brother František, published as a foreword for the English translation of the book. However, it was only in recent years that Langer’s Hebrew poetry has also become available to English-speaking readers, revealing his linguistic strategies that draw on mystical traditions in the attempt to form a modern synthesis of Jewish homosexual identity. Jiří Langer’s literary activity shows Prague as a site of self-definition through multilingualism, rather than the more familiar image of Kafka ’s “deterritorialization”.
This article examines the Danube as a site of cultural memory and exploration, focusing on the de... more This article examines the Danube as a site of cultural memory and exploration, focusing on the descriptions of Bratislava as seen in A Time of Gifts (1977) by British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor and Danubio (Danube, 1986) by Italian literary scholar Claudio Magris. For both Leigh Fermor, who saw it in the 1930s, and Magris, who visited in the 1980s, Bratislava serves as a border between the familiar West and the exotic East, and as a site of nostalgia for what Magris describes as “a multiple and supranational culture [koiné]”. When seen in relation to the debate over Central European identity in the 1980s, both narratives look to the Slovak capital’s multilingual past as a sign of its “marginocentric” history, but Leigh Fermor’s trilogy has largely been overlooked by theorists of Danubian culture, while Magris has been accused of complicity with the forces of oppression (from Habsburg to Communist) described in his work.
Full text: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journals/article/60272/
The theory of minor... more Full text: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journals/article/60272/ The theory of minor literature (based on Kafka’s hybrid identity in Prague) is applicable to the complex case of Czech and Slovak-Romani writing, including fictional portrayals of the Roma. The Irish-American writer Colum McCann’s Zoli, published in 2006, features a Slovak-Roma woman who becomes an acclaimed poet under the Communist regime, only to be cast out by her community and forced into exile. Two years later, Irena Eliášová (a Roma writer born in Slovakia who lives in the Czech Republic) published her novel Our Settlement (Naše osada), a far more affectionate view of the Roma society of her childhood. Both writers walk an uneasy balance in presenting Slovak-Roma culture from both insider and outsider perspectives. In McCann’s case the intention of bringing one of Europe’s most misunderstood minorities to anglophone readers struggles to avoid cultural appropriation, while Eliášová’s use of multilingualism negotiates the power dynamics between Czech, Slovak, and Romani.
Çeviribilim ve Uygularmaları Dergisi/Journal of Translation Studies, 2018
This article compares the translations of Jaroslav Hašek’s satirical novel The Good Soldier Švejk... more This article compares the translations of Jaroslav Hašek’s satirical novel The Good Soldier Švejk (Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za svĕtové války, 1923), known in Turkish as Aslan Asker Şvayk. Švejk entered world literature through its German translation; since then it has been translated three times into English and has appeared in many other world languages. There are now at least seven different Turkish versions, published from the 1960s to 2005, probably one of the highest numbers of Švejk translations in any language. This is particularly notable since none of them were done from the original Czech, but through indirect translation. Even the Turkish title is an indirect translation from the French title, Le Brave Soldat Chveïk, via a Swiss adaptation. The “retranslation hypothesis” in translation studies suggests that early translations of a source text are domesticated to the target language, while retranslations are more faithful to the original. This is not the case, however, in translations between less commonly spoken languages, such as Czech and Turkish, which are often based on indirect translation via a third language such as English, French, or German. Drawing on the methodology of Czech translation scholars (Levý, Daneš, Špirk et. al.), this case study shows how indirect translations from less common languages both depend on the language of the source text and are adapted to the cultural standards of the target language.
Andre Gingrich’s concept of frontier Orientalism focuses on the former Habsburg Empire, which has... more Andre Gingrich’s concept of frontier Orientalism focuses on the former Habsburg Empire, which has been overlooked by Orientalist and postcolonial studies. Through a comparison of Slovak, Polish, Hungarian, and Czech novelists, including Janko Kalinčiak, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Géza Gárdonyi, Jaroslav Durych, and Jozef Horák, this study shows how the genre of historical fiction evoked what Gingrich calls Central Europe’s “timeless mission” of defending the frontiers of the West from Eastern barbarians, as a metaphor for the repression of minority identities.
Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 2017
Little work has been done on the connections (both social and textual) between Europe’s smaller n... more Little work has been done on the connections (both social and textual) between Europe’s smaller nations and America’s racial minorities. Yet nations in Central Europe that had been freed from imperial rule at the end of World War I, particularly the newly established Czechoslovakia, provided Harlem Renaissance writers, especially Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, with an example of a group that had developed self-reliance through cultural achievement. By collecting the work of established writers like W.E.B. Du Bois and emergent poets like Hughes, Locke emphasized the parallels between the newly self-confident cultural identity of African Americans and the rise of newly independent nations around the world, stating that "Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia."
The Czech dissident movement that began in the late 1970s was a network in which women played a k... more The Czech dissident movement that began in the late 1970s was a network in which women played a key role, but the Czech writers who gained fame in the West were invariably men. In Philip Roth’s 1985 novella The Prague Orgy, his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman meets a woman writer named Olga, whose pursuit of the American writer owes more to erotic fantasy than to the milieu Roth recreates in otherwise faithful detail. This portrayal of the Czech female as both sexualized and “other” can be traced back to twentieth century Prague-German writers,but Roth both politicizes and intellectualizes this archetype by making the desiring (rather than desired) woman a writer and dissident. A real-life perspective on the Czech disidentka (female dissident) appears in the work of Dominik Tatarka, one of the few Slovak writers tobe closely associated with the dissident movement. The last work Tatarka published in hislifetime was a memoir based on tape-recorded interviews with Eva Štolbová, who became Tatarka’s connection to Prague dissident circles. In 1988, these Navrávačky (Tapings) were published in edited book form in Germany, and it was not until more than a decade later that the full transcripts were published in Slovakia. While the female Czech dissident is eroticized in this text as well, Štolbová is not a mere object of desire; she portrays her side of the story inher own memoir, Lamento (1994). The gender dynamic between Štolbová and Tatarka subverts the cultural assumption in which the Czech language was constructed as “masculine”and Slovak as “feminine.” Thus both Roth and Tatarka illustrate the interplay between “otherness”and gender in the production of dissident culture, and its reception by domestic (both Czech and Slovak) as well as international readers.
The Turkish comic folk hero Nasreddin Hodja is known across the Muslim and former Ottoman world, ... more The Turkish comic folk hero Nasreddin Hodja is known across the Muslim and former Ottoman world, but he also has a unique place in modern Slavic literatures (Russian, Bosnian/Serbian, Bulgarian, and Czech). What is interesting in each of these works is the way that this character has been adapted as a transcultural icon, transforming his medieval Islamic spirit into something suitable for modern national literatures while preserving his essential comic qualities. Nasreddin’s Slavic "afterlife” is not simply a forerunner of literary globalization, it also shows how exotic figures allow expanded freedom of expression under various forms of cultural repression.
This article analyzes the socialist-era adaptation of Antigone by Slovak playwright Peter Karvaš ... more This article analyzes the socialist-era adaptation of Antigone by Slovak playwright Peter Karvaš (Antigone and the Others, 1962) through some of the most influential theoretical interpretations of the classical text by Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Lacan.
Among the earliest Western representations of the Muslim world were those written by Central Euro... more Among the earliest Western representations of the Muslim world were those written by Central European authors who had survived captivity in the Ottoman Empire, which form a largely unexplored genre of “Ottoman captivity narratives.” While strongly related in both theme and style to the better-known Barbary captivity genre, these memoirs offer a broader framework for captivity narratives beyond the customary focus on English-language or West European texts. This article examines Ottoman captivity narratives from Georgius of Hungary’s Tractatus (1481) and Bartolomej Georgijević’s De Turcarum moribus epitome (1553), written in Latin; to Václav Vratislav z Mitrovic’s Příhody (1599, published in 1777) and Štefan Pilárik’s Sors Pilarikiana (1666), written in Czech. There is also one Turkish perspective of Austrian captivity, by Osman Aga of Temesvar (1724, published in 1954). While these works reflected the cultural assumptions of their era, they reflect an underlying ambiguity toward the Turks, and sometimes a concealed admiration for Ottoman society, while others offer the forthright condemnation expected of the era. Through the comparative approach of transnational history, the Ottoman captivity narrative can be seen as a genre that reflects common experiences of engagement with the Orient beyond the modern linguistic and politic divisions of the Central European region.
Despite the growing interest in world literature beyond the Western canon, the nations of post-so... more Despite the growing interest in world literature beyond the Western canon, the nations of post-socialist Central Europe remain a blind spot in Western literary criticism and theory. While Franz Kafka inspired Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of “minor literature,” their distinction between “minor” and “major” leaves intact the prevalent assumption that “small literatures” are inherently “national,” while the literatures and languages of the larger world powers are essentially universal. Yet the multicultural terrain of Central Europe offers an ideal context for comparative cultural criticism, since these literatures were forced to negotiate at every stage of their development with neighbouring cultures. This makes Central Europe an exemplary site of cultural translation, a concept originally derived from anthropological research, which is not only about making connections but also about asserting difference and finding a balance between assimilation and resistance.
Milan Kundera’s insistence on the need for a “median context” in world literature emphasizes the importance of studying Central European writers in a regional rather than national setting. One case study introduced here is a comparison of two writers who fall between Slovak and Hungarian literature: Sandor Márai and Gejza Vámoš. Both Márai and Vámoš were native Hungarian speakers, but Vámoš was born in present-day Hungary and chose to write in Slovak, while Márai was a native of today’s Slovakia and became a major Hungarian modernist author. Both of these authors evoke the mixed cultures and languages of prewar Central Europe, but Márai affirms his essentially Hungarian identity, while Vámoš embraces the multilingualism of the region. Such a comparative approach to the median context of Central European fiction by specialists in the region may increase its visibility within world literature studies.
Thomas Bell's 1941 novel Out of This Furnace, a fictionalized account of his family's immigration... more Thomas Bell's 1941 novel Out of This Furnace, a fictionalized account of his family's immigration from eastern Slovakia to industrial Pittsburgh, is a significant example of the use of ‘mixed languages’ in ethnic American literature. It was translated into Slovak in 1949 as Dva svety (Two Worlds.) The novel has bridged the gap between Slovak and American culture in the three ways explored here: Bell’s use of Slovak dialect, the Slovak translation, and two dramatic adaptations from the 1970s (an American play and a Slovak televised film). This case illuminates the complex relationship between ethnic American writers and their lands of origin, particularly in the case of less commonly spoken languages.
1616: Anuario de la Sociedad Española de Literatura General y Comparada, 2012
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of “minor literature” has had considerable impact not ... more Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of “minor literature” has had considerable impact not only on the study of Franz Kafka, but on the field of comparative literature. This article questions whether this theory’s linguistic assumptions are adequate for the complex cultural landscape of modern Prague, and examines the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s speculations on minor literatures overlook or simplify important aspects of the Czechoslovak literary context. For a counter-perspective, it draws on Milan Kundera, who offers the “small nations” as a different vantage point on European history.
1948 and 1968 – Dramatic Milestones in Czech and Slovak History, 2008
Milan Kundera and Václav Havel, two of the leading figures in Czech culture during the “Prague Sp... more Milan Kundera and Václav Havel, two of the leading figures in Czech culture during the “Prague Spring” of 1968, took differing political positions after the reform movement was repressed by the Soviet-led invasion that August. In a pair of essays published in the last months of relative freedom, the two writers reveal their reactions to the crisis, in which Kundera praises the supposed Czech national tradition of “critical thinking” while Havel calls for a more politically engaged “criticism.” The gap between these two terms illustrates the difference between these two key figures of 1968: for Kundera, literary and intellectual integrity lie at the heart of Czech survival, while for Havel, true criticism calls for concrete acts of resistance. This distinction can be followed in their literary careers through the 1980s, when Kundera and Havel became the best-known voices from the Czech exile and dissident communities, respectively, and the “Prague Spring” regained widespread attention with the worldwide success of Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Havel’s comments on Kundera’s most famous work of fiction provide interesting perspective on its connection to the real events of 1968 and its historical legacy. In his latest essay collection, The Curtain (2007), Kundera reflects on the Prague Spring and the invasion in terms that return to his ideas on national destiny from four decades earlier.
Slovakia’s position at the margins of the imperial powers is reflected in its ambiguity toward th... more Slovakia’s position at the margins of the imperial powers is reflected in its ambiguity toward the Ottoman legacy in Eastern Europe, which combines a ‘historical’ perspective with a more abstract ‘mythical’ one. Although the Ottoman occupation of southern Slovakia was much shorter than that of the Balkans, images of the ‘Turkish threat’ have persisted in Slovak culture into the modern period. As it has been adapted in genres from folklore to travelogue, Romantic poetry to modern opera, the symbolism of the Turkish ‘other’ has shifted in relation to the evolving Slovak sense of national identity.
Revue LISA/LISA e-journal. Littératures, Histoire des …, 2005
This article examines the themes of jazz and exile in Another Country by the African-American nov... more This article examines the themes of jazz and exile in Another Country by the African-American novelist James Baldwin and The Bass Saxophone by the Czech-Canadian writer Josef Škvorecký. Other exiled African-American and Czech writers such as Richard Wright and Milan Kundera have insisted upon the political aspect of jazz, which Wright describes as an “ecstatic rejection” of society, and which Kundera describes as in constant evolution, in contrast to popular music. In Baldwin’s Another Country, jazz is strongly tied to the characters who are most marginalized from American society: not only Rufus, the Black jazz musician, but also Eric, the white expatriate returning from France. The music of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday offers a background to the most intimate moments of these characters, and bears witness to their profound desire to find a better homeland. For Škvorecký (who left Eastern Europe for North America) and Baldwin (who left America to pass much of his life in France and Turkey) jazz transforms these painful experiences into art, serving both as inspiration and catharsis.
In 1989, only months before the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, three of Pavel Vilikovský’... more In 1989, only months before the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, three of Pavel Vilikovský’s books were published almost simultaneously. The most widely acclaimed of them was the novel Večne je zelený . . . (Ever Green is . . .) which Robert Pynsent describes as "a sidesplitting satire on totalitarianism, 'spy mania', Slovaks and nationalism.” This novel's seemingly frivolous subversion of cultural identities relentlessly challenges the assumptions of Slovak and Czech readers. Even as it parodies the longstanding Slovak obsession with identity through the nationally, linguistically, and sexually ambiguous narrator, an aging and forgetful but still cunning spy, Ever Green is . . . establishes a uniquely Slovak perspective on modern European history by affirming Slovakia’s marginality as its greatest historical advantage. Through a rich mix of languages, Vilikovský recreates the multiethnic “Babel” of early twentieth-century Central Europe, repositioning the nearly always marginalized Slovak language at the center.
In their 1927 novel The Twelve Chairs (Dvenadtsat Stuliev,) Ilf and Petrov introduced Ostap Bende... more In their 1927 novel The Twelve Chairs (Dvenadtsat Stuliev,) Ilf and Petrov introduced Ostap Bender, a character who became one of the most beloved figures in modern Russian literature. While Bender reveals little about his background, he often states proudly that he is “the son of a Turkish father.” This sympathetic “Turkish” character really could only have emerged, at least in the Soviet era, from one place and time: the multicultural port of Odessa in the 1920s. Ostap Bender is the product not only of two authors, writing in the uncertain period between two regimes, but also of the two empires that faced each other across the Black Sea, creating a uniquely appropriate case of “dialogic” prose as described by Mikhail Bahktin. For most Russians, Bender’s “Turkish” background is a decidedly minor, if not incidental, aspect of his character. However, a deeper examination of this cross-cultural identity provides a useful vehicle for stretching Edward Said’s “boundaries between East and West” with a north-south model of the Russian/Turkish “Orient.”
Although they were probably among the most cosmopolitan of British literary couples, Willa and Ed... more Although they were probably among the most cosmopolitan of British literary couples, Willa and Edwin Muir's greatest fame arguably came from their jointly credited translations of Franz Kafka. Edwin Muir's reputation as one of the major poets of the interwar Scottish Literary Renaissance long overshadowed that of his wife as a novelist, but more recently a number of literary scholars have worked to bring greater attention to Willa's work, including Kirsty Allen and Aileen Christianson. The late scholar and editor Margery Palmer McCulloch from the University of Glasgow, who discussed both Willa and Edwin in considerable detail in her monograph Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange (2009) devoted the last several years of her life to a joint biography of the Muirs, leaving a full but unrevised draft when she died in 2019. Thanks to the editing work of Roderick Watson, the book was recently published by Oxford University Press, offering the first genuinely balanced account of the mutual influence these two distinctive figures had on each other's life and work. While both of them published autobiographies (Edwin in 1954 and Willa in 1968), and much of the material has been covered by previous scholars, this study is particularly useful for its detailed analysis of both Muirs' relationship to Prague and the Czechs.
This article provides an overview of the most important works on Slovak literature by the leading... more This article provides an overview of the most important works on Slovak literature by the leading British scholar in the field, the late Robert B. Pynsent, from his edited collection Modern Slovak Prose (1990) to his afterword for the translation of Ján Johanides’s But Crime Does Punish (2022). His themes range from nationalism in 19th-century writers to the ironization of sexuality in the post-1989 generation, for whom he coined his own term, the “Genitalists”.
Taking Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of minor literature as a starting point, this a... more Taking Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of minor literature as a starting point, this article moves from their opposition of “major/minor” literatures to their “tetralinguistic” model of vernacular, vehicular, referential, and mythic language. It presents the work of the polyglot poet and Hasidic scholar Jiří Langer to offer a multifaceted view of three distinct contexts: the theoretical discourse of minor literature, the literary milieu of interwar Prague, and the history of gay Czech and Jewish writing. Langer appears in Franz Kafka ’s diaries and letters over a period of several years as a source of information on Jewish culture, as well as a personal contact to prominent rabbis from the east. Two decades later, Langer produced his own remarkable work in Czech, Devĕt bran (Nine Gates, 1937), a popular-scholarly study of Hasidic traditions based on his experience in the Galician town of Belz. Much of what is known today about Jiří Langer’s unconventional life comes from the memoirs of his brother František, published as a foreword for the English translation of the book. However, it was only in recent years that Langer’s Hebrew poetry has also become available to English-speaking readers, revealing his linguistic strategies that draw on mystical traditions in the attempt to form a modern synthesis of Jewish homosexual identity. Jiří Langer’s literary activity shows Prague as a site of self-definition through multilingualism, rather than the more familiar image of Kafka ’s “deterritorialization”.
This article examines the Danube as a site of cultural memory and exploration, focusing on the de... more This article examines the Danube as a site of cultural memory and exploration, focusing on the descriptions of Bratislava as seen in A Time of Gifts (1977) by British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor and Danubio (Danube, 1986) by Italian literary scholar Claudio Magris. For both Leigh Fermor, who saw it in the 1930s, and Magris, who visited in the 1980s, Bratislava serves as a border between the familiar West and the exotic East, and as a site of nostalgia for what Magris describes as “a multiple and supranational culture [koiné]”. When seen in relation to the debate over Central European identity in the 1980s, both narratives look to the Slovak capital’s multilingual past as a sign of its “marginocentric” history, but Leigh Fermor’s trilogy has largely been overlooked by theorists of Danubian culture, while Magris has been accused of complicity with the forces of oppression (from Habsburg to Communist) described in his work.
Full text: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journals/article/60272/
The theory of minor... more Full text: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journals/article/60272/ The theory of minor literature (based on Kafka’s hybrid identity in Prague) is applicable to the complex case of Czech and Slovak-Romani writing, including fictional portrayals of the Roma. The Irish-American writer Colum McCann’s Zoli, published in 2006, features a Slovak-Roma woman who becomes an acclaimed poet under the Communist regime, only to be cast out by her community and forced into exile. Two years later, Irena Eliášová (a Roma writer born in Slovakia who lives in the Czech Republic) published her novel Our Settlement (Naše osada), a far more affectionate view of the Roma society of her childhood. Both writers walk an uneasy balance in presenting Slovak-Roma culture from both insider and outsider perspectives. In McCann’s case the intention of bringing one of Europe’s most misunderstood minorities to anglophone readers struggles to avoid cultural appropriation, while Eliášová’s use of multilingualism negotiates the power dynamics between Czech, Slovak, and Romani.
Çeviribilim ve Uygularmaları Dergisi/Journal of Translation Studies, 2018
This article compares the translations of Jaroslav Hašek’s satirical novel The Good Soldier Švejk... more This article compares the translations of Jaroslav Hašek’s satirical novel The Good Soldier Švejk (Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za svĕtové války, 1923), known in Turkish as Aslan Asker Şvayk. Švejk entered world literature through its German translation; since then it has been translated three times into English and has appeared in many other world languages. There are now at least seven different Turkish versions, published from the 1960s to 2005, probably one of the highest numbers of Švejk translations in any language. This is particularly notable since none of them were done from the original Czech, but through indirect translation. Even the Turkish title is an indirect translation from the French title, Le Brave Soldat Chveïk, via a Swiss adaptation. The “retranslation hypothesis” in translation studies suggests that early translations of a source text are domesticated to the target language, while retranslations are more faithful to the original. This is not the case, however, in translations between less commonly spoken languages, such as Czech and Turkish, which are often based on indirect translation via a third language such as English, French, or German. Drawing on the methodology of Czech translation scholars (Levý, Daneš, Špirk et. al.), this case study shows how indirect translations from less common languages both depend on the language of the source text and are adapted to the cultural standards of the target language.
Andre Gingrich’s concept of frontier Orientalism focuses on the former Habsburg Empire, which has... more Andre Gingrich’s concept of frontier Orientalism focuses on the former Habsburg Empire, which has been overlooked by Orientalist and postcolonial studies. Through a comparison of Slovak, Polish, Hungarian, and Czech novelists, including Janko Kalinčiak, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Géza Gárdonyi, Jaroslav Durych, and Jozef Horák, this study shows how the genre of historical fiction evoked what Gingrich calls Central Europe’s “timeless mission” of defending the frontiers of the West from Eastern barbarians, as a metaphor for the repression of minority identities.
Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 2017
Little work has been done on the connections (both social and textual) between Europe’s smaller n... more Little work has been done on the connections (both social and textual) between Europe’s smaller nations and America’s racial minorities. Yet nations in Central Europe that had been freed from imperial rule at the end of World War I, particularly the newly established Czechoslovakia, provided Harlem Renaissance writers, especially Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, with an example of a group that had developed self-reliance through cultural achievement. By collecting the work of established writers like W.E.B. Du Bois and emergent poets like Hughes, Locke emphasized the parallels between the newly self-confident cultural identity of African Americans and the rise of newly independent nations around the world, stating that "Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia."
The Czech dissident movement that began in the late 1970s was a network in which women played a k... more The Czech dissident movement that began in the late 1970s was a network in which women played a key role, but the Czech writers who gained fame in the West were invariably men. In Philip Roth’s 1985 novella The Prague Orgy, his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman meets a woman writer named Olga, whose pursuit of the American writer owes more to erotic fantasy than to the milieu Roth recreates in otherwise faithful detail. This portrayal of the Czech female as both sexualized and “other” can be traced back to twentieth century Prague-German writers,but Roth both politicizes and intellectualizes this archetype by making the desiring (rather than desired) woman a writer and dissident. A real-life perspective on the Czech disidentka (female dissident) appears in the work of Dominik Tatarka, one of the few Slovak writers tobe closely associated with the dissident movement. The last work Tatarka published in hislifetime was a memoir based on tape-recorded interviews with Eva Štolbová, who became Tatarka’s connection to Prague dissident circles. In 1988, these Navrávačky (Tapings) were published in edited book form in Germany, and it was not until more than a decade later that the full transcripts were published in Slovakia. While the female Czech dissident is eroticized in this text as well, Štolbová is not a mere object of desire; she portrays her side of the story inher own memoir, Lamento (1994). The gender dynamic between Štolbová and Tatarka subverts the cultural assumption in which the Czech language was constructed as “masculine”and Slovak as “feminine.” Thus both Roth and Tatarka illustrate the interplay between “otherness”and gender in the production of dissident culture, and its reception by domestic (both Czech and Slovak) as well as international readers.
The Turkish comic folk hero Nasreddin Hodja is known across the Muslim and former Ottoman world, ... more The Turkish comic folk hero Nasreddin Hodja is known across the Muslim and former Ottoman world, but he also has a unique place in modern Slavic literatures (Russian, Bosnian/Serbian, Bulgarian, and Czech). What is interesting in each of these works is the way that this character has been adapted as a transcultural icon, transforming his medieval Islamic spirit into something suitable for modern national literatures while preserving his essential comic qualities. Nasreddin’s Slavic "afterlife” is not simply a forerunner of literary globalization, it also shows how exotic figures allow expanded freedom of expression under various forms of cultural repression.
This article analyzes the socialist-era adaptation of Antigone by Slovak playwright Peter Karvaš ... more This article analyzes the socialist-era adaptation of Antigone by Slovak playwright Peter Karvaš (Antigone and the Others, 1962) through some of the most influential theoretical interpretations of the classical text by Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Lacan.
Among the earliest Western representations of the Muslim world were those written by Central Euro... more Among the earliest Western representations of the Muslim world were those written by Central European authors who had survived captivity in the Ottoman Empire, which form a largely unexplored genre of “Ottoman captivity narratives.” While strongly related in both theme and style to the better-known Barbary captivity genre, these memoirs offer a broader framework for captivity narratives beyond the customary focus on English-language or West European texts. This article examines Ottoman captivity narratives from Georgius of Hungary’s Tractatus (1481) and Bartolomej Georgijević’s De Turcarum moribus epitome (1553), written in Latin; to Václav Vratislav z Mitrovic’s Příhody (1599, published in 1777) and Štefan Pilárik’s Sors Pilarikiana (1666), written in Czech. There is also one Turkish perspective of Austrian captivity, by Osman Aga of Temesvar (1724, published in 1954). While these works reflected the cultural assumptions of their era, they reflect an underlying ambiguity toward the Turks, and sometimes a concealed admiration for Ottoman society, while others offer the forthright condemnation expected of the era. Through the comparative approach of transnational history, the Ottoman captivity narrative can be seen as a genre that reflects common experiences of engagement with the Orient beyond the modern linguistic and politic divisions of the Central European region.
Despite the growing interest in world literature beyond the Western canon, the nations of post-so... more Despite the growing interest in world literature beyond the Western canon, the nations of post-socialist Central Europe remain a blind spot in Western literary criticism and theory. While Franz Kafka inspired Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of “minor literature,” their distinction between “minor” and “major” leaves intact the prevalent assumption that “small literatures” are inherently “national,” while the literatures and languages of the larger world powers are essentially universal. Yet the multicultural terrain of Central Europe offers an ideal context for comparative cultural criticism, since these literatures were forced to negotiate at every stage of their development with neighbouring cultures. This makes Central Europe an exemplary site of cultural translation, a concept originally derived from anthropological research, which is not only about making connections but also about asserting difference and finding a balance between assimilation and resistance.
Milan Kundera’s insistence on the need for a “median context” in world literature emphasizes the importance of studying Central European writers in a regional rather than national setting. One case study introduced here is a comparison of two writers who fall between Slovak and Hungarian literature: Sandor Márai and Gejza Vámoš. Both Márai and Vámoš were native Hungarian speakers, but Vámoš was born in present-day Hungary and chose to write in Slovak, while Márai was a native of today’s Slovakia and became a major Hungarian modernist author. Both of these authors evoke the mixed cultures and languages of prewar Central Europe, but Márai affirms his essentially Hungarian identity, while Vámoš embraces the multilingualism of the region. Such a comparative approach to the median context of Central European fiction by specialists in the region may increase its visibility within world literature studies.
Thomas Bell's 1941 novel Out of This Furnace, a fictionalized account of his family's immigration... more Thomas Bell's 1941 novel Out of This Furnace, a fictionalized account of his family's immigration from eastern Slovakia to industrial Pittsburgh, is a significant example of the use of ‘mixed languages’ in ethnic American literature. It was translated into Slovak in 1949 as Dva svety (Two Worlds.) The novel has bridged the gap between Slovak and American culture in the three ways explored here: Bell’s use of Slovak dialect, the Slovak translation, and two dramatic adaptations from the 1970s (an American play and a Slovak televised film). This case illuminates the complex relationship between ethnic American writers and their lands of origin, particularly in the case of less commonly spoken languages.
1616: Anuario de la Sociedad Española de Literatura General y Comparada, 2012
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of “minor literature” has had considerable impact not ... more Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of “minor literature” has had considerable impact not only on the study of Franz Kafka, but on the field of comparative literature. This article questions whether this theory’s linguistic assumptions are adequate for the complex cultural landscape of modern Prague, and examines the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s speculations on minor literatures overlook or simplify important aspects of the Czechoslovak literary context. For a counter-perspective, it draws on Milan Kundera, who offers the “small nations” as a different vantage point on European history.
1948 and 1968 – Dramatic Milestones in Czech and Slovak History, 2008
Milan Kundera and Václav Havel, two of the leading figures in Czech culture during the “Prague Sp... more Milan Kundera and Václav Havel, two of the leading figures in Czech culture during the “Prague Spring” of 1968, took differing political positions after the reform movement was repressed by the Soviet-led invasion that August. In a pair of essays published in the last months of relative freedom, the two writers reveal their reactions to the crisis, in which Kundera praises the supposed Czech national tradition of “critical thinking” while Havel calls for a more politically engaged “criticism.” The gap between these two terms illustrates the difference between these two key figures of 1968: for Kundera, literary and intellectual integrity lie at the heart of Czech survival, while for Havel, true criticism calls for concrete acts of resistance. This distinction can be followed in their literary careers through the 1980s, when Kundera and Havel became the best-known voices from the Czech exile and dissident communities, respectively, and the “Prague Spring” regained widespread attention with the worldwide success of Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Havel’s comments on Kundera’s most famous work of fiction provide interesting perspective on its connection to the real events of 1968 and its historical legacy. In his latest essay collection, The Curtain (2007), Kundera reflects on the Prague Spring and the invasion in terms that return to his ideas on national destiny from four decades earlier.
Slovakia’s position at the margins of the imperial powers is reflected in its ambiguity toward th... more Slovakia’s position at the margins of the imperial powers is reflected in its ambiguity toward the Ottoman legacy in Eastern Europe, which combines a ‘historical’ perspective with a more abstract ‘mythical’ one. Although the Ottoman occupation of southern Slovakia was much shorter than that of the Balkans, images of the ‘Turkish threat’ have persisted in Slovak culture into the modern period. As it has been adapted in genres from folklore to travelogue, Romantic poetry to modern opera, the symbolism of the Turkish ‘other’ has shifted in relation to the evolving Slovak sense of national identity.
Revue LISA/LISA e-journal. Littératures, Histoire des …, 2005
This article examines the themes of jazz and exile in Another Country by the African-American nov... more This article examines the themes of jazz and exile in Another Country by the African-American novelist James Baldwin and The Bass Saxophone by the Czech-Canadian writer Josef Škvorecký. Other exiled African-American and Czech writers such as Richard Wright and Milan Kundera have insisted upon the political aspect of jazz, which Wright describes as an “ecstatic rejection” of society, and which Kundera describes as in constant evolution, in contrast to popular music. In Baldwin’s Another Country, jazz is strongly tied to the characters who are most marginalized from American society: not only Rufus, the Black jazz musician, but also Eric, the white expatriate returning from France. The music of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday offers a background to the most intimate moments of these characters, and bears witness to their profound desire to find a better homeland. For Škvorecký (who left Eastern Europe for North America) and Baldwin (who left America to pass much of his life in France and Turkey) jazz transforms these painful experiences into art, serving both as inspiration and catharsis.
In 1989, only months before the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, three of Pavel Vilikovský’... more In 1989, only months before the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, three of Pavel Vilikovský’s books were published almost simultaneously. The most widely acclaimed of them was the novel Večne je zelený . . . (Ever Green is . . .) which Robert Pynsent describes as "a sidesplitting satire on totalitarianism, 'spy mania', Slovaks and nationalism.” This novel's seemingly frivolous subversion of cultural identities relentlessly challenges the assumptions of Slovak and Czech readers. Even as it parodies the longstanding Slovak obsession with identity through the nationally, linguistically, and sexually ambiguous narrator, an aging and forgetful but still cunning spy, Ever Green is . . . establishes a uniquely Slovak perspective on modern European history by affirming Slovakia’s marginality as its greatest historical advantage. Through a rich mix of languages, Vilikovský recreates the multiethnic “Babel” of early twentieth-century Central Europe, repositioning the nearly always marginalized Slovak language at the center.
In their 1927 novel The Twelve Chairs (Dvenadtsat Stuliev,) Ilf and Petrov introduced Ostap Bende... more In their 1927 novel The Twelve Chairs (Dvenadtsat Stuliev,) Ilf and Petrov introduced Ostap Bender, a character who became one of the most beloved figures in modern Russian literature. While Bender reveals little about his background, he often states proudly that he is “the son of a Turkish father.” This sympathetic “Turkish” character really could only have emerged, at least in the Soviet era, from one place and time: the multicultural port of Odessa in the 1920s. Ostap Bender is the product not only of two authors, writing in the uncertain period between two regimes, but also of the two empires that faced each other across the Black Sea, creating a uniquely appropriate case of “dialogic” prose as described by Mikhail Bahktin. For most Russians, Bender’s “Turkish” background is a decidedly minor, if not incidental, aspect of his character. However, a deeper examination of this cross-cultural identity provides a useful vehicle for stretching Edward Said’s “boundaries between East and West” with a north-south model of the Russian/Turkish “Orient.”
Central Europe and the Non-European World in the Long 19th Century, 2022
The Ottoman invasions of the early modern period are among the historical events that have been m... more The Ottoman invasions of the early modern period are among the historical events that have been most often portrayed in Central European folk traditions and literature. A unique example is the legendary “well of love” at Trenčín Castle in western Slovakia, supposedly dug by the Turkish Omar in order to free his beloved Fatima, held in captivity by the Hungarian count Stephen Zápolya, who ruled Trenčín in the 1490s. Despite its “historical” setting, this story was first published in German in the early nineteenth century by Hungarian nobleman Alois Freiherrn von Mednyánszky (who may have created the legend himself). Introduced to English readers by the traveler John Paget only a decade later, the tale entered Slovak literature almost simultaneously with the codification of the modern Slovak literary language by Ľudovíť Štúr, whose brother Karol wrote the verse adaptation (still in Czech) “A Monument to Love” in 1844, followed by their friend Mikuláš Dohnány’s poetic version “The Well of Trenčín” in 1846. Although the story’s events and characters (other than Zápolya) are fictional, and historians agree that the well was dug by sixteenth-century Austrian soldiers rather than a noble Turk, it remains today the most popular tourist attraction in Trenčín and one of the most enduring love stories in Slovak culture. This chapter analyzes the textual reproduction of this legend in relation to shifting definitions of national identity in the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire, and includes the first full translation in English of the original legend.
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793614872/Frontier-Orientalism-and-the-Turkish-Image-in-Central-Europ... more https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793614872/Frontier-Orientalism-and-the-Turkish-Image-in-Central-European-Literature This comparative study analyzes the ways that Central European writers used stereotypes of the Turks to develop their national identities from the early modern period to the present. Charles D. Sabatos uses Andre Gingrich’s concept of “frontier Orientalism” to foreground his analysis of Central European Orientalism, designating the nations of the former Habsburg Empire as the occident and the Turks as the oriental “Other.” This study applies theoretical approaches to literary history—as developed by scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt and Linda Hutcheon—to a range of texts from the early modern period, the nineteenth-century national revivals, interwar independence, and the communist and postsocialist regimes. By following these depictions across literatures and over an extensive historical period, this study illustrates how the Turkish stereotype evolved from a menace to a more abstract yet still powerful metaphor of resistance, and finally to a mythical figure that evoked humor as often as fear.
Ottoman imagery in Central European literature goes back to folkloric sources, whose influence on... more Ottoman imagery in Central European literature goes back to folkloric sources, whose influence on the development of Baroque poetry contributed to the frequent use of anti-Turkish imagery during this period. The emergence of prose in the region was centered on the related genres of travel writing and captivity narratives, which drew on and promoted combination of religious antipathy and condemnation of Turkish brutality. However, there are important distinctions in the way the Ottoman legacy has been perceived in the different regions of Cental and Eastern Europe. In the Balkans, the Ottoman period is still seen as a dark period of stagnation, but it is still a historical legacy, inseparable from the national past. While Hungary is not a Slavic nor a Balkan nation, its literature was also strongly marked by the Ottoman invasions and occupation. In the Czech Republic, on the other hand, direct contact with the Ottoman Empire was limited, and thus it is almost a mythical legacy, more prevalent at the level of folklore than as a living historic force. Slovakia offers one of the more complex examples of the Turkish image in Eastern Europe, since its perceptions of the Ottoman Empire blend elements of the historical and mythical perspectives, reflecting its position at the northern edge of the Turkish occupation. The East Central European imagery of the Turks can contribute to the critical debate on the relationship between representation and power, as a case in which politically weak yet European-identified cultures have been shaped through an indirect relationship with a non-Western and Muslim but hegemonic and imperialist “Other.”
In this study, the “minor Mediterranean” (drawn from Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature) ser... more In this study, the “minor Mediterranean” (drawn from Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature) serves as the theoretical framework for the interwar novelists Claude McKay and Panait Istrati, both of whom came to the Mediterranean region from the margins of Western society (Jamaica and Romania). McKay’s Banjo (1929), featuring a group of dockworkers from the African diaspora in Marseille, and Istrati’s two-volume Mediterranean: Sunrise/Sunset (1934–1935), set among Romanians in the Levant, portray migrant minorities struggling to survive. Their autobiographical protagonists encounter cruelty and suffering, form bonds of solidarity with fellow expatriates, and transcend ethnic divisions by resisting class exploitation, illuminating the crisis of European modernity from unfamiliar perspectives.
Gender and Sexuality in 1968: Transformative Politics in the Cultural Imagination, pp. 193-217., 2009
The Czech student Jan Palach, who committed suicide by self-immolation in January 1969 in protest... more The Czech student Jan Palach, who committed suicide by self-immolation in January 1969 in protest of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, became an international icon of resistance on both sides of the Cold-War-era ideological divide. The numerous literary representations of Palach, beginning almost immediately after his death, cross cultures and genres but share a crucial concern with the violence enacted upon the body by political forces. This study examines the way that Palach’s physical self-destruction by fire has been appropriated not only by Czech and other East European (Polish, Bulgarian, Croatian) writers, but also by those in the West (Italian, German, and British.) After the two decades in which Palach’s memory was officially taboo in Czechoslovakia, he has been enshrined as a Czech national martyr, but the meaning of his sacrifice has become increasingly remote, even as it continues to inspire tragic acts of imitation.
Contexts, Subtexts, and Pretexts: Literary translation in Eastern Europe and Russia. , 2011
Milan Kundera’s 1984 essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” attempted to redraw the Cold War bound... more Milan Kundera’s 1984 essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” attempted to redraw the Cold War boundaries of Europe, arguing that the “small nations” of Central Europe were historically western, but had been “kidnapped” into an alien eastern culture. Originally written in French as “A Kidnapped West,” the essay was adapted in its better-known translation into English, subtly adjusting the boundaries between Central, Western, and Eastern Europe. Kundera’s claim for a transnational Central European identity can be seen as a form of “cultural translation” for Western readers, helping to create a new image for the region, yet due to the variations between these versions, there is no genuine “original” text to draw authoritative borders between east and west.
Grotesque Revisited: Grotesque and Satire in the Post/Modern Literature of Central and Eastern Europe, Aug 2013
In his autobiographical trilogy, written in the mid-1980s, Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal casts hi... more In his autobiographical trilogy, written in the mid-1980s, Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal casts himself as a character through the eyes of his wife Pipsi. The first volume, In-House Weddings (Svatby v domě, 1987, translated 2007), portrays the difficulties of life in the early Communist period, with Hrabal’s signature combination of the lyrical and the grotesque. Hrabal’s prose has also inspired writers across national borders, including the Hungarian Péter Esterházy and the Polish Paweł Huelle. Esterházy’s novel The Book of Hrabal (Hrabal könyve, 1990, trans. 1995) creates a postmodern Central European landscape (an imagined hybrid of Budapest and Prague) to satirize the absurdity of life in the late Communist period. Like Hrabal’s autobiography, it is narrated by the author’s wife, but in this case the implied audience is Hrabal himself. Huelle’s Mercedes Benz: Letters to Hrabal (Mercedes Benz: Z Listów do Hrabala, 2001, trans. 2005), is an autobiographical work about the author’s family in interwar Lviv (then the Polish Lwów) with elements based on a Hrabal short story. Both works cross not only national but also linguistic boundaries, incorporating passages in Czech (either taken from, or inspired by, Hrabal) into the text itself. With their use of intertextuality and parody, these works reflect the influence of what Linda Hutcheon has termed “historiographic metafiction,” with “its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs." By alluding to Hrabal as a quintessentially Central European novelist, these authors not only satirize Communist societies, but also evoke a shared Austro-Hungarian past whose legacy endured through the nationalistic and ideological divisions of the twentieth century.
An evening with Christopher Harwood, PhD, Lecturer in Czech at Columbia University, and Charles S... more An evening with Christopher Harwood, PhD, Lecturer in Czech at Columbia University, and Charles Sabatos, PhD, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Yeditepe University in Istanbul, Turkey. They will present highlights of the past century of Czech and Slovak literature. Their talk will be accompanied by readings in English from six literary works—three Slovak and three Czech.
Thomas Bell’s 1941 novel Out of This Furnace is the best-known depiction of Slovak immigrants in ... more Thomas Bell’s 1941 novel Out of This Furnace is the best-known depiction of Slovak immigrants in American literature. It was translated from English into Slovak in 1949 as Dva svety (Two worlds). The novel has bridged the gap between Slovak and American culture in three different ways: Bell’s use of Slovak dialect, the Slovak translation, and two adaptations from the 1970s (an American play and a film for Slovak television). Bell’s novel illuminates the complex relationship between ethnic American writers and their lands of origin, particularly focusing on the literary use of the Slovak language.
This Slovak lecture from 2016 was published in the attached file. It also appeared in English in... more This Slovak lecture from 2016 was published in the attached file. It also appeared in English in 2018, in my co-edited issue of "World Literature Studies" on "Frontier Orientalism in Central and East European Literatures": http://www.wls.sav.sk/?page_id=1275&lang=en
Published by Perfekt, 2010. This charming fairy-tale will take you to the fantasy land of a gree... more Published by Perfekt, 2010. This charming fairy-tale will take you to the fantasy land of a greeen meadow in the middle of which is found the witness to this ancient story – an old, bushy, spreading oak. You will get to know the four elves that turn the handle of a miraculous barrel-organ, which plays the melodies of the four seasons, and the little fairy Viva who likes dancing most of all to the melody of her beloved spring elf. Also, you will meet Futura, the wicked tree frog, whose greediness tips the world uspside-down! None the less, all that is evil will be transformed into good, and so each season of the year will once again have its irreplaceable tune. The spring, the summer, the autumn or the winter one...
The “Ottoman captivity narrative” shaped emerging national literatures in Central and Eastern Eur... more The “Ottoman captivity narrative” shaped emerging national literatures in Central and Eastern Europe, much as the “Indian” and “Barbary” captivity narratives left its mark on the development of American and English literature. This paper examines “Ottoman” narratives by writers from the Austrian-Turkish borderlands, such as Bartholomew Georgijević, Georgius de Hungaria, Václav Vratislav z Mitrovic, and Štefan Pilárik.
Paměť válek a konfliktů: V. kongresu světové literárněvědné bohemistiky, 2016
The representations of the “Turkish wars” of the 16th and 17th centuries in Czech and Slovak lite... more The representations of the “Turkish wars” of the 16th and 17th centuries in Czech and Slovak literature are a legacy of the Ottoman-Habsburg conflict combined with mythical elements of Orientalist fantasy. Popular literature in interwar Czechoslovakia, such as Ľudovit Janota’s Slovak Castles (Slovenské hrady, 1934) or František Volf’s collection of historical prose Turkish War (Turecká vojna, 1938) treated the period of the Turkish wars as a part of the effort to create new national identities, after the country’s independence and unification. In post-socialist literature, when the Turk no longer represents a mythical enemy, but a realistic, sometimes even positive character, as in Peter Macsovszky’s essay “But there’s nothing here” (“Veď tu nič nie je,” 1998) and Stanislav Komárek’s novel The Opshellsties Foundation (Oplštisová nadace, 2002), the memory of the Turkish wars reveals the construction of contemporary European identities.
Conference Program: "Central Europe and Balkan Muslims: Relations and Representations", Prague, V... more Conference Program: "Central Europe and Balkan Muslims: Relations and Representations", Prague, Villa Lanna, October 2-3, 2017. Organized by the Institute of History - Czech Academy of Sciences.
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The theory of minor literature (based on Kafka’s hybrid identity in Prague) is applicable to the complex case of Czech and Slovak-Romani writing, including fictional portrayals of the Roma. The Irish-American writer Colum McCann’s Zoli, published in 2006, features a Slovak-Roma woman who becomes an acclaimed poet under the Communist regime, only to be cast out by her community and forced into exile. Two years later, Irena Eliášová (a Roma writer born in Slovakia who lives in the Czech Republic) published her novel Our Settlement (Naše osada), a far more affectionate view of the Roma society of her childhood. Both writers walk an uneasy balance in presenting Slovak-Roma culture from both insider and outsider perspectives. In McCann’s case the intention of bringing one of Europe’s most misunderstood minorities to anglophone readers struggles to avoid cultural appropriation, while Eliášová’s use of multilingualism negotiates the power dynamics between Czech, Slovak, and Romani.
Milan Kundera’s insistence on the need for a “median context” in world literature emphasizes the importance of studying Central European writers in a regional rather than national setting. One case study introduced here is a comparison of two writers who fall between Slovak and Hungarian literature: Sandor Márai and Gejza Vámoš. Both Márai and Vámoš were native Hungarian speakers, but Vámoš was born in present-day Hungary and chose to write in Slovak, while Márai was a native of today’s Slovakia and became a major Hungarian modernist author. Both of these authors evoke the mixed cultures and languages of prewar Central Europe, but Márai affirms his essentially Hungarian identity, while Vámoš embraces the multilingualism of the region. Such a comparative approach to the median context of Central European fiction by specialists in the region may increase its visibility within world literature studies.
The theory of minor literature (based on Kafka’s hybrid identity in Prague) is applicable to the complex case of Czech and Slovak-Romani writing, including fictional portrayals of the Roma. The Irish-American writer Colum McCann’s Zoli, published in 2006, features a Slovak-Roma woman who becomes an acclaimed poet under the Communist regime, only to be cast out by her community and forced into exile. Two years later, Irena Eliášová (a Roma writer born in Slovakia who lives in the Czech Republic) published her novel Our Settlement (Naše osada), a far more affectionate view of the Roma society of her childhood. Both writers walk an uneasy balance in presenting Slovak-Roma culture from both insider and outsider perspectives. In McCann’s case the intention of bringing one of Europe’s most misunderstood minorities to anglophone readers struggles to avoid cultural appropriation, while Eliášová’s use of multilingualism negotiates the power dynamics between Czech, Slovak, and Romani.
Milan Kundera’s insistence on the need for a “median context” in world literature emphasizes the importance of studying Central European writers in a regional rather than national setting. One case study introduced here is a comparison of two writers who fall between Slovak and Hungarian literature: Sandor Márai and Gejza Vámoš. Both Márai and Vámoš were native Hungarian speakers, but Vámoš was born in present-day Hungary and chose to write in Slovak, while Márai was a native of today’s Slovakia and became a major Hungarian modernist author. Both of these authors evoke the mixed cultures and languages of prewar Central Europe, but Márai affirms his essentially Hungarian identity, while Vámoš embraces the multilingualism of the region. Such a comparative approach to the median context of Central European fiction by specialists in the region may increase its visibility within world literature studies.
This comparative study analyzes the ways that Central European writers used stereotypes of the Turks to develop their national identities from the early modern period to the present. Charles D. Sabatos uses Andre Gingrich’s concept of “frontier Orientalism” to foreground his analysis of Central European Orientalism, designating the nations of the former Habsburg Empire as the occident and the Turks as the oriental “Other.” This study applies theoretical approaches to literary history—as developed by scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt and Linda Hutcheon—to a range of texts from the early modern period, the nineteenth-century national revivals, interwar independence, and the communist and postsocialist regimes. By following these depictions across literatures and over an extensive historical period, this study illustrates how the Turkish stereotype evolved from a menace to a more abstract yet still powerful metaphor of resistance, and finally to a mythical figure that evoked humor as often as fear.
http://www.wls.sav.sk/?page_id=1275&lang=en