| Popis: |
Volume II of the Culture and Totality series is thematically devoted to war, understood here as a formative framework. World War One, in its manifestations and consequences, completely transformed the mental and geographical map of the world. Yet the studies collected in the volume do not follow exclusively the links outlined by this groundbreaking conflict. The texts seek to understand was as an extreme situation, wherein states and governments modify the rules of the established order, constrain their citizens and intervene brutally in their lives. Especially the large was conflicts of the 20th century were „total wars“ with the potential of drawing one epoch to its close and prepare the ground for the advent of a new era. The authors of the individual essays view these connections from the perspectives of their own specialized interests. They develop the initial thematic emphasis on war as extreme situation with regard to separate problematic areas, which they then consider against the background of cultural politics, literary history, film, theatre, music and the visual arts and anchor them in issues defined by particular personal destinies and individual artworks, reflecting in various ways the situation of war. The volume is divided into two parts. Part I, called The Prolegomena, contains essays on various general cultural, philosophical and theoretical issues regarding the connections between war and its concretization in the arts. The authors draw on literature and philosophy (Daniel Vojtěch: War in the Days of the Advocate Bucephalus. On the Possibilites of Self‑Defence) as well as on the visual arts (Josef Vojvodík: „War, Hide!“ History as an Agonal Play: On Toyen's 1939–1945 Paintings and Drawings) and film and scenography (Petra Hanáková: War in the Age of its Reproduction in Images). Their goal is to introduce various general issues and links which are then variously developed by the essays included in Part II. Part II, called Probes and Analyses, contains essays following the genre and the methodology of a case study, focused on issues from various disciplines and interdisciplinary areas. They are set in chronological order and thematically they cover the entire 20th century, focusing on issues stemming from the three great total wars of the age: the two „hot“ world wars as well as the „cold“ war. The topics include the questions of identity and value reversals caused in the cultural space by World War One (Libuše Heczková – Kateřina Svatoňová – Magda Španihelová: “How Many Idols Have Fallen During the War, How Much External Appearance Has Peeled Off ”: The Search for “Normality” in Abnormal Times), its aesthetic representation and ideological interpretation (Petr Málek: War and Its Representation in Modern Literature: Weiner's Lítice: Kostajnik) and the coming‑ to‑ terms of cinematography as the then youngest art with the reality of war (Ivan Klimeš: Austrian Cinematography in the Great War). Václav Vaněk (Heart Beyond Soča. Czech Writers on the Italian Front 1915–1918) and Radek Hylmar (Both Terror and Antimilitarism: Czech Anarchists on Violence 1890–1914) write of the attitude of (artistic) individuality to the broadly destructive war events of 1914–1918 and of the immediately antecedent period. War as the initiation of various ideological confrontations, provoking a radical desire of maintaining the integrity of the axiological spectrum and subject to its destructive tensions, is the topic of Jan Dobeš (Gallant Heroes versus Cowardly Merchants. World War One as Spiritual and Cultural Conflict in the Light of the German Ideological Propaganda) and Michal Topor (Intellectual /Philologist – Poet/ in the War: The Case of Otokar Fischer). Luboš Merhaut (Švejk and “Švejking” in Czech Literary Criticism of the 1920 s-1940s) and Michael Špirit (Švejk's Ways in the War) analyze the phenomenon of Hašek's novel's hero as a specific concretization of the war experie |
