• Publications close
• Research data close
• Other research products close
• CZ close
• Digital Humanities and Cultural Her... close

The article focuses on the poems of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin which he wrote after his release from the clinic, i.e. between 1807 and 1820. The author attempts to show that the texts which he places in the first period of Hölderlin’s tower production, differ in form and content both from the work produced before his hospitalization and from the poems written later in the tower. While the external conditions of the poet’s life did not change, his texts did, but this fact has not been satisfactorily elucidated yet.

Untranslatability, the word and the thing, appear frequently in the texts of the first period of Czech functional structuralism, from 1926 to 1948. According to the particular dynamic and systematic perspective observed by the authors of the Prague Circle, any text is always and in any case untranslatable, because it is impossible to transpose the set of functional interactions and correlations in which the original was imbricated. Indeed, untranslatability, in one way or another, has historically always haunted any theory of translation. During the classical period and also the during linguistic paradigm of the second half of the 20th century, the fact of essential inter- or intralinguistic untranslatability was either denied or tragically experienced as an irreparable loss. After the so-called cultural turn in translation studies, a shift occurred whereby untranslatability has come to be considered as a zone of emergence of creativity and generation of innovations. In this paper, I will focus on two articles written by V. Procházka and P. Eisner in order to examine how they can enrich the current conceptions of translation and evolution of literary systems.

Against the background of the 100th anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death, the article explores a branch of author-as-character fiction that escapes the generic restraints of biography and biofiction: unchained writer fiction. Using Steven Soderbergh’s film Kafka (1991), filmmaker Gil Kofman’s novel debut aKa (2023), and Haruki Murakami’s global bestseller Kafka on the Shore (2002/2005) as a provisional sample, different modes of unchaining Kafka from the fetters of biography and biofiction are brought to light and contrasted against each other.

The object of the present study is a particular literary reference that repeatedly appears in Michel Foucault’s work — a reference to the work of Ann Radcliffe. We present a close study of the passages where Foucault, in one way or another, deals with Ann Radcliffe’s novels (or novels that he believed to be written by Radcliffe), and attempt to show that Foucault’s interest in the “literature of terror” is not at all accidental. For Foucault, Gothic fiction is a literary “embodiment” of the historical tran sition from classicism to modernity.

This paper discusses some aspects of past and present debates concerning the English terms used to collectively refer to members of Indigenous peoples in the United States, and relates them to the Czech controversy about the capitalization of the “i” in the Czech word “indián“ (Indian). The paper follows the history of referring to the Native population, arguing that the inability to find a term in the language of the dominant Anglophone culture that is not controversial reflects the deeply problematic relationship of that culture to the cultures it has colonized and whose identity it has damaged. In this context, it is interesting to ask whether the Czech dispute over the capital “I” in the word “Indián” is a purely orthographic matter, or whether it points to more complex, albeit unreflected, issues of colonization and cultural oppression

The paper explores the use of ethnicity as a strategic tool in the politicization of the Mexican diaspora in the United States of America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Referring to the example of the 1969 founding manifesto entitled “The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán” (El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán), it pays attention to the ways in which a section of the Mexican diaspora in the United States — Chicanos — came to identify themselves with the indigenous peoples of the United States and Mexico in the construction of their new collective identity. The text further examines the symbols of the Aztlán and the Bronze Race, the meanings attributed to them, and the question of authorship. In doing so, it draws on the interpretive frameworks of S. Hall, B. Anderson, R. Barthes and M. Castells. It concludes that the manifesto represents a highly selective, strategic narrative which mirrors both the Chicano movement’s claims for recognition in the US and the ways the Mexican diaspora interpreted its past to serve its current and future goals between the 1960s and early 1970s.

The text is an introduction to a series of seven studies and essays dealing with the use of the term indián/Indián (Indian) in the Czech language as well as in the Anglo-Saxon and Latin American contexts. The editorial first briefly introduces the main problems of the use of the term indián/Indián and related terms both in the domestic and in the Anglo-Saxon and Latin American contexts. It then presents the problems of the grammatical use of the word indián/Indián in the Czech language. It also sums up the discussion related to the use of the term indio in the Anglo-Saxon and Ibero-American environment. Furthermore, it discusses the meaning and genesis of the term indio in the Spanish language and the environment of the former Spanish overseas colonies. The issue of the use of the term indio/indígena in contemporary discourse, academic in particular, is also examined.

The paper discusses the appropriateness of using the word Indian in the Czech language and gives reasons why it is correct to spell it using a capital letter. The second part of the paper deals with the naming of the various Native American ethnic groups in Czech.