Abstract
This book aims to analyze Czech literary criticism of the 1990s from the perspective of political reading and tries to find the reasons for the depoliticization of the Czech literary field. It disputes the thesis that literature was stripped of its social roles and commitments at the beginning of this decade and focused only on its literary values.
In the first section, the basic tendencies of Polish literary criticism are introduced: these form a contrast to the Czech context. Through this contrast, some underlying notions of Czech literary historiography are problematized.
The author discusses Polish ideas about recent literary history and shows, for example, the specifically Polish different approach to 1989 as a periodization milestone or ideas about the dis/continuity of literature. The second section defines political reading as a practice that has been present in literary scholarship since at least the 19th century and points out its possible contributions to the Czech literary scholarship.
The third section discusses the following terms: politics and police (Rancière), depoliticization (Schmitt, Barthes) and ideology (Eagleton). These are adjusted to the specifics of the Czech context.
The last part of the book provides a political interpretation of the critical reception of three novels by Michal Viewegh. Reception becomes the main focus here: the debates around these novels include covert political messages such as the fight for claiming the historical narrative of the previous political regime, the disputes over positions of the individual actors (critics, scholars, writers), or arguments over the concepts of high and low literature.
These reflect the helplessness of the literary field, caused by the pressure of the commercialized book market. This part also looks at the debates on the so-called authentic literature and program manifestoes of the early 1990s that were going on in this period.
These examples show that the Czech literary field’s proclaimed split from politics is only rhetorical: the result is not its autonomy, but an unreflected heteronomy. At the same time, this analysis shows that the reasons why 1989 is still seen as an unquestionable milestone are not related to this turning point as such, but stem from mid-1990s debates and the resulting constitution of the literary field.
In the conclusion, the author points out the connection between the literary-historical narrative and the generation of literary scholars who co-created it and introduces the notion of “the myth of a new beginning”.