UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

16-18th February 2006

Saturday 18 February 2:30 – 4:00: Panel K4: Literary Trends

Ondřej Sládek (Czech Academy of Sciences): ‘Czech literature and postmodernism: metamorphosis of stories.’

„Summerizing basic features of the postmodern novel and, at the same time, looking at it from the inside, touching the essential can perhaps occur only in one consistent form: In confession. I believe in the one postmodern god, in the dejected, libellous and devaluated but still living story." These are the words of one of the leading representatives of the postmodern line in the Czech prose of the 90´s – Jiri Kratochvil – which he pronounced in his essay Postmodernist´s Confession (1996) that, from then on, started to play the role of a certain „program text" in Czech (postmodern) literature.

Kratochvil´s confession as well as following discussions on the problem of literary postmodernism revealed the specificity of its Czech variation. Postmodern thinking entered into Czech culture together with the end of the totalitarian régime. The defence of postmodernism which Kratochvil delivers then stands close to the defence of freedom of speech and the euphoria from its attainment. To what extent this closeness influenced the form of the Czech postmodern thinking, and that especially in connection with the literary production, is the objective of the presented contribution.

My paper is divided into three parts. The first part is of a historical-synoptic character. It records the way original Czech literary production and criticism reacted to postmodernism, why and in what way critics accepted postmodernism, which authors were regarded by critics as postmodern and which were not and how the authors themselves reacted to being joined or excluded.

The second part concentrates on a certain paradox of postmodernism in the Czech surroundings: The strange problem which was often actualized in the context of the period is the disbelief in the story of literary works. This disbelief comes, however, into close contact with the need to settle with the past. The character of this settlement, however, logically resulted in the need to defend the story, its structure – and that not only in historiographic but also in literary works which chose this theme for the ground plan of their world of fiction. The superior question which defines the direction of the whole contribution then is: Is it at all possible to think of any dominant features of the Czech postmodern literature?

The third part of the study is planned as theoretically-methodological: Based on the researches of scholars: Zima, Hutcheon and McHale in the field of postmodern poetics, it focuses on the observation of the changes of textual and narrative novels which occurred as a result of the enforcement of the postmodernism thesis of the extinction of metanarration. The nucleus then is the proposal of the typology of the postmodern novel production (textual models) which is applied to the situation of Czech postmodern literature. Thanks to it we can think over parallel and essential features of „postmodern literature" on the world but also specifically Czech scale. This typology and the comparison of individual models are then, in this part, developed into the form of a brief outline of Czech postmodern literature from the bird´s-eye view.