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Václav Smyčka, Psychoanalysis before psychoanalysis? Late Enlightenment interest in the unconscious and trauma
Smyčka, Václav
This study deals with the understanding of trauma, neurosis and the unconscious in psychological narratives and case studies during the late Enlightenment in the Czech lands, focusing on the texts of the philosopher, writer and naturalist Gottfried Immanuel Wenzel and the writer Christian Heinrich Spiess. It shows that the interest of these authors in these phenomena did not so much stem from emerging Romanticism as from the empirical Enlightenment teaching on the soul, and often from surprisingly archaic theories such as the Aristotelian concept of the soul and memory and the mechanical notion of the functioning of nerve fibres, based on the principle of vibration. In particular, Wenzel combined his reflections on neuroses with his research into dreams, displaced thoughts and the principles behind dream imagery, thus anticipating some of the theses of psychoanalysis.
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Wandering off after Libuše, or the Identities of Josef Jiří Kolár
Futtera, Ladislav
This study analyses three works by the writer and playwright Josef Jiři Kolar: the German-language short story Libussa am Missisippi (Libuše in Mississippi, 1842), its Czech version Libuše v Americe (Libuše in America, 1854) and the drama Věštba Libušina (Libuše’s Prophecy, 1868). These are used as an example to demonstrate Kolar’s artistic development and changes in the identity of a writer working in the Czech lands around the mid-19th century. During the period under review, Kolar, who in 1842 had been an actor in German and Czech ensembles at the Estates Theatre, publishing in both languages, came to be an acclaimed Czech-language playwright. This career is faithfully reflected in these three texts. In the case of Libuše in Mississippi, this is an original attempt to critically come to terms from the position of the Young Bohemia (Junges Bohmen) artistic group with the heritage of romantic poetics, romantic stereotypes about the Czech lands and ultimately with the romantic nationalism of the Czech national movement. Although Kolar made a number of alterations when rendering the novel into Czech, his text was not compatible with the mythological-historical reading of the Libuše legend, dominant in Czech-language culture. It was not until Libuše’s Prophecy, staged to mark the laying of the foundation stones for the National Theatre, that he did conform. Kolar negated both of his previous Libuše texts with her message, which appealed to the historicism that pervaded Czech society. However, this negation also meant a definitive artistic identification with the Czech national programme and the acceptance of a Czech national identity. With regard to his creative trajectory, Kolar may thus be perceived as a typical representative of the generation of artists who began their career in the early 1840s, critically addressing Romanticism and Romantic nationalism, but after the 1848 revolution its members integrated, both on the Czech and the German side, into the nationalized bourgeois society of the Czech lands.
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Journeys to 'I'. Manifestations of individualism in Czech culture of the 19th century
Piorecká, Kateřina ; Bendová, Eva ; Hrdina, Martin
Kniha přináší příspěvky ze 41. ročníku plzeňského mezioborového sympozia, věnovaného manifestacím individualismu v průběhu „dlouhého“ 19. století. Otázky spojené se sebereflexí, sebeprezentací či sebeuskutečněním rezonovaly různým způsobem ve světě mužů a žen z řad měšťanstva, dělnictva i aristokracie. Autoři studií věnují pozornost vyhraněným osobnostem a leckdy složitému hledání a vymezování jejich pozice ve společnosti – vůči ideologickým projektům, uměleckým konvencím apod. Problematika individualismu je v publikaci obsahující obrazovou přílohu nahlížena z perspektivy historie, filozofie a různých uměnověd.
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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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Between art and the class struggle. The collective identity of typography workers n the context of 19th century sociocultural changes
Raška, Jakub
This study aims to link the cultural history of early industrialization with the beginnings of the labour movement, exploring the changing collective identity of printers and typesetters, both elite and elitist skilled print workers, at a time of basic social change. Due to their proximity to written culture, typographers were the first manual workers to take up the pen and themselves reflect on the changes in their position. The source material consists of Czech and German texts from the latter half of the 19th century. In order to compare typographers’ changing identities, texts and conditions from the Early Modern period are also examined. In addition to texts written by typographers, an examination is also made of typographic association activities and typographers’ strikes, as typographers’ identities increasingly changed.
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