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Melancholic souls. Social dysfunction and social phobias in Czech literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries
Řezníková, Lenka
This study deals with the presentation of social dysfunction in 1890s Czech Decadent literature. At a time when other literary movements were highlighting mass society and crowd behaviour as a topos, neo-Romantic, Decadent and Symbolist literature was reflecting extreme forms of individualism. The staging of pathological anxieties here became part of a broad contemporary debate over the relationship between individualism and a modernising, consumerist, conformist and manipulable society, which was also subject of contemporary psychology under various headings during and especially at the end of the 19th century. Pathological individualism was not presented in neo-Romantic, Decadent and Symbolist literature either as something people are obliged to choose, or as a goal of emancipatory endeavours, but as a condition to which some individuals are “condemned” as a result of uncontrollable, e.g. genetic, factors.
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History in public space: Changes of institutions of memory.
Pýcha, Čeněk ; Činátl, Kamil (advisor) ; Stehlík, Michal (referee) ; Řezníková, Lenka (referee)
Čeněk Pýcha History in public space: Changes of institutions of memory Abstract The submitted dissertation project is based on a longer research interest in memory and remembering. Interdisciplinary memory studies is one of the most dynamically developing subdisciplines in the social sciences and humanities. The aim of this work is to contribute to the ongoing academic discussion and to explore some environments of making sense of the past, which so far stood rather on the periphery of research interests. The research field of this project is defined by the questioning of transformations of memory institutions. I observe this change primarily on the trajectory of movement from grand institutions of memory to small ones. As the grand institutions of memory, I understand the traditional institutions of the interpretation of the past that were born in the modernization process. In this dissertation project, I focus mainly on institutions of heritage preservation and museums. With the partial disintegration of grand collective frameworks, these institutions are divided into small institutions. I study this movement in case studies on contemporary cultural practices of remembrance in new memory ecologies. I focus on digital platforms for travelers, remembering through visual communication or interest in places...
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Social time and its representation in the performance-oriented society of the 19th century: liberalization - monetization - pluralization
Řezníková, Lenka
One of the symptoms of the transition from the premodern society of estates to a modern civil society, as realized during the 19th century (at least at the ideological level) was the highlighting of time and its transformation into a secular instrument of liberal ideology. The monetization of time, expressed in Benjamin Franklin’s famous formulation „time is money“ (translated into Czech in 1838) allowed time to be conceived as a factor in social ascent. In contrast to the estates privileges that quarantees social status on given a priori selective principles, time was given to everybody and its appropriate utilization could ensure social ascent even for individuals from the lowest social strata. Hence time becomes a key component in the new liberal biographical project of social ascent, not only in the biological sense, but also with regard to the structure of social behaviour. Numerous instructions are given (even in fiction) on how to utilize time properly and transform it into material profit. As time in increasingly highlighted, so the importance of time periods and deadlines grows and need also incerases for synchronization and correct timing, because each actor noe disposes of his own time, which is not always compatible with the time of others actors. This study attempts to show how the new secularized time was represented in the emerging performance-oriented society and what consequences were in store for the monetization of time beyond this optimistic liberal discourse within the modernist generation at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
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Literary modernism and the truth behind hoaxes. The symbolist conception of hoaxes between gnoseological enthusiasm and epistemological scepticism
Řezníková, Lenka
The study focuses the shifts in the representations of hoax in the Czech literature at the end of the 19th century and their epistemological context. Whereas in previous decades mystifications were particularly represented as a social practice, at the turn of the century they free itself from existing ethical standards and raise to a legitimate aesthetic and gnoseological category. This shift in the conception of hoaxes reflected the general rise in the scepticism, which at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries cast doubt over illusory obviousness of empirical evidence. Despite this epistemological scepticism, however, a new conception showed some gnoseological optimism, i.e. did not exclude the possibility of gaining knowledge as such. However it postulated knowledge of a new and unempirical kind reflecting the danger of delusion.
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Prominent margin: Imagination of the Czech-German borderland in 19th and 20th century literature
Řezníková, Lenka
The study deals with the concept of the Czech-German "borderland" as a spatial, mental ad social figure participing in the construction of the ethnic (national and cultural) differences and of otherness in general. Interpreting 19th and 20th century Czech literary texts, it shows the main transformations of this concept, from the idea of language frontier (dominating in the 19th century) to representation of the border territory (in the 20th century) Underscoring the cultural and historical conditionality of the frontier as a social institution, and the influence of cartography for its socialization, the study focuses on the spatial and semiotic consequences of these transformations.
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