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The City Dweller´s Distrust of Folk. The Narrative Figure
Jedličková, Alice
This paper focuses on a strategy used to represent rural people, or “simple folk,” in narratives whose goal is to motivate readers to reassess their own attitudes towards the folk. The authorial intent of such works draws from the idea that traditional values are not appreciated and therefore must be discovered and protected (e.g., language, the past, the rural folk). Urban dwellers’ prejudiced perception of the countryside represented in such narratives can be simply formulated through contrasting images: for example, the progress, education, and conveniences offered by the city versus the backwardness, ignorance, and poverty of the countryside. This strategy is based on the distrustful or dismissive views of city people towards the folk as implicitly voiced by the narrator or by a specific character in the narrative. In contrast, we also find rather explicit counterarguments against these views in the speech of the narrator or in the speech, actions, and behaviors of the characters. In rural-themed prose from the 1850s through the 1870s, the subject matter of this study, this constellation of ideas and opposing ideas is regularly reflected in both the story and the narrative discourse and forms a stable narrative device, which substantially contributes to forming the narrative point-of-view and its effectiveness in persuading readers. In some works, this narrative device permeates the entire text and affects its genre - in Božena Němcová’s short story “Poor Folk” the “slice of life” genre intertwines with the genre of argument: every situation presented is in some regards an argument against the previously established idea that “city people distrust the folk.”
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„Time does not stand still, my friend...”Narrated and experienced time in the fiction of Teréza Nováková
Jedličková, Alice ; Piorecká, Kateřina
The main topic in Teréza Nováková's prose work Děti čistého živého came to be the religious plurality of villages and solitary residences around Proseč. The author decided to follow the fortunes of a fairly large group of characters over several decades. Hence the literary critics described this work of fiction as a novel chronicle. The author was also induced to do this by her ethnographically erudite approach to descriptions of the environments and the usual activities of the characters speaking together in their authentic dialect. However, the author's intention was different, as testified by the initial outline of the work, the author's diary, the novel manuscript and personal correspondence. This is also confirmed by an analysis of the narrative structure: by developing a novel methodology based on objectivizing narration and bold time structure, Nováková succeeded in creating a novel on the individual forms of time lived under the burden of the irreversible, inexorable march of physical time.
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