Syllabus
SYLLABUS OF THE COURSE1. Periphery, death and the modern hero. The thematic prelude to modernism. Charles Baudelaire. Dox - Vanitas. Theorist: Thomas Stearns Eliot ("Baudelaire")2. Man of the crowd, observer, violent reality. Edgar Allan Poe. Evil in Flannery O'Connor. The theorist: Jonathan Culler.3. Passion, morality and spiritual issues. Nathanael Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter; Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov; Egon Bondy: The Brothers Ramaz. The theorist Vladimir Svatoň ("The Atheist's Mass").4. French Symbolists, Paul Verlaine's conversion. The first delineation of modernism in conjunction with naturalism. The theorist Eugen Wolff.5. Czech modernists and spiritual themes. Machar, Sova, Březina. Under one banner. Contemporary work of priest-literates. Theorist Martin C. Putna.6. (Spiritual) analysis of the modern world. France: the work of Charles Péguy. Theorist Jan Zahradníček "On the reading of poems".7. Catholicism in the Jazz Age. Jacques and Raissa Maritain. Le Roseau d'Or. Existentialism and Catholicism and Georges Bernanos. The theorist Stephen Schloesser.8. Other links between the French and Czech Catholic milieu. Léon Bloy, Fascizing Catholicism. Joseph Florian and the Old Empire. Theorist Martin C. Putna ("Léon Bloy - Shall the Lion Roar?")9. The influence of Paul Claudel's "Prague Years", the connection of Claudel with the early work of Jan Zahradníček and Václav Renč. Claudel's friend Francis Jammes. The theorist Jan Čep. Two texts by Jan Čep on Paul Claudel.10. The work of Jakub Demel between modern expressionism and naivism. Theorist: Jaroslav Med.
Annotation
The lecture offers overall orientation in chosen aspects of literary modernity which can be detected in the artistic and art-related discourse from the 2nd half of 19th century onwards. It examines specific expressions of modernity and modernism throughout the European literature of the 20th century with close attention to the spiritual emphases that were present in this discourse.
Motto: “Catholicism brought a terrible sacrifice to its (understandable, but uncontrolled) fear of “time”: most part of the spiritual elite between 1830 and 1950 (Heer, The Intellectual History of Europe)