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1929. The Year of (not only) The Barber-Surgeon: Poetics, Dream, Literary Polemics

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2019

Abstract

This study aims to present the development of Czech literature over the course of a single year: 1929. The themes, motives, and figures found in R.

Weiner's The Barber-Surgeon (dream, dream writing, language, failure, literary polemics) constitute a point of departure as well as the dominant features of a literary period which is otherwise rather amorphous. By virtue of Weiner's poetics, a thread of sense begins to emerge, and eventually the 'story' or 'drama' of 1929, out of the re-constructed configurations and correlations of several different literary texts.

The author considers Weiner's 'dream poetics' as the central feature of a network of relations that unite a number of texts published in 1929: the short story AM from J. Deml's collection My Purgatory; the poem The New Icarus by K.

Biebl; K. Čapek's Tales from Two Pockets; J. Durych's essay on Poetics; and V.

Vančura's novel The Last Judgement. The themes and figures under consideration here are all related to the writer's self-consciousness in the creative process and the attention paid by the writer to material elements of the work.