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The Concept of the Cave and the Theory of All Art
Petrasová, Taťána
The text is based on the well-known fact that in the 18th century a merging of garden theory and architectural theory occurred, and raises the question of how the theory of architecture and the theory of gardens came to be linked. In the author’s view, the two theories were brought closer by the attempt at that time to create a universal theory of all art forms as advocated by Johann Wolfgang Goethe.
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Dr. Schuh´s Projection Microscope and the “Daguerreotype in Practice”
Trnková, Petra
The central focus of the paper is one of three daguerreotype photomicrographs that have been preserved in Central European collections. Namely the one that is to be found today in the National Technical Museum in Prague, which has traditionally been attributed to the rector of the grammar school in Litomyšl (East Bohemia), Florus Ignatz Stašek. Attention is payed both to the technical conditions under which this image may have been created and the question of who was responsible for it, with reference to the role (which cannot be overlooked) played by one of the pioneers of photography and modern microscopy in Austria, Carl Schuh.
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Optical Devices in Literature around the Year 1800
Smyčka, Václav
The study examines the relationship between literature and optical media (zograscopes, peepshows and magic laterns) in the late 18th century and the first half of the 19th century, in other words before the advent of photography and film. It is based on the theses of the media theorist Friedrich Kittler about the mutual overlap and delimitation between literary imagination, optical devices and anthropological ideas about human fantasy. It examines these relationships in the works of literature writen in Czech and German in the czech lands during this period, focusing in particular on texts by Christian Heinrich Spiess and his role played in them by the magic latern. An analysis of Spiess´ works and examples from other 19th - century Czech and Czech-German authorsshows, that from the end of the 18th century the magic latern became not only a frequent literyry motif, but also a model though which these authors understood the functioning of the human imagination as such. It appears that in Spiess´ thought the pathological state of phantasy is relatedto the normal functioneng of the imagination in the same way as a defect in the projection apparatus is related to its normal operation. However, the magic latern also functions in Spiess´ oevre as a poetological programme. Spiess sees his own writing as criticism of the work of the optical media, but at the same time develops their specific poeticism and attempts to compensate it for it. He also disseminates imagination through multiple intermedial references, ans it thus seemingly trans-medial relationships between literature and optical media well before the announcement of the end of the Gutenberg galaxy.
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The Discovery of Inner Light in the Soul of Modern People
Hrdina, Martin
The study describes the discovery of ideas of inner light in people, which was inspired in the Czech lands by an Oriental renaissance and which manifested itself in the thinking of the philosopher František Čupr. A new resonance of archaic ideas in the modern era, dominated by physical theories of light, is mapped out in the religious discourse of the 1860s and 1870s, based on the example of the discussion about Christ at the time. Čupr´s concept of Christ, drawing on the texts of the ancient Indian Upanishads and Puranas, is compared with the interpretation in the biography of Christ by Ernest Renan, which was widely read at the time. At the end of the article, attention is devoted to manifestations of the new concept of light in this segment of the Czech literary field, whose authors had the greatest preconditions for interiorising stimuli coming from Oriental cultures.
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„How Nice It Was in the Sitting Room When It Had Grown Dark!“ The Black Hour and Reflection on it in 19th-Centrury Czech Literature
Piorecká, Kateřina
In the 19th century the term “the black hour” meant the break in work at sunset, before it was worth lighting the lamps. Figuratively it became the general term for the period of dusk and after nightfall, when people used to sit together and talk. This phenomenon was originally connected with winter seasonal work, in particular flas-spinning session. The lighting conditions allowed oral traditions to survive, which in the course of the 19th century came to interest students of folklore and ethnographers. However, the process of industrialisation not only put an end to the tradition of people sitting together and talking while spinning or plucking feathers, but also severed cyclical time and placed the emphasis on the linearity of everything that happened. As part of the progressive transformation of traditional structures in civil society the process of literalisation needs to be observed as well. Czech writers imprinted oral forms such as legends, fairy-tales, or humorous stories into prestigious literary genres such as ballads, idylls, or short stories whit a moral. Taking the example of Božena Němcová’s shor proses and her novel Babička (Grandmother), the article shows that as a writer she tried to raise texts that had been passed down orally into the literary canon by the use of prestigious genres.
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The Water Spirit, the 'Prince of Death and Darkness'
Šidák, Pavel
The study shows the relationship between the demonic world and the categories 'darkness' and 'light'. As a representative of the demonic world the water spirit has been chosen, a figure that is firmly rooted in the Czech mythological system and is in many respects a specific one. The intuitive connection between the demonic world and the area of 'darkness' is demonstrated, but at the same time this connection is exposed as a retrospective interpretation of the world of Christian thought and is qualified by the ability of demonic figures, as portrayed in art, to participate in both the 'dark' and the 'light' chronotope. The true “darkness” of this figure, thanks to which the water spirit and the demonic world in general are still attractive themes for art today, is to be seen in the fact that it is not human, not recognisable, and cannot be grasped.
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