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On the 5th December 2014 the second joint workshop of the 9th Programme of Research Development Areas at Charles University (PRVOUK 09), “Literature and Art in Intercultural Contexts” was held. As regards the form of its organization as well as the mode of discussion, it followed the first interdisciplinary meeting, which was dedicated to the issues of artistic identity, conceived as a distinctive cultural agent. Summaries of the papers from this first meeting have been published in a volume Identities – Construction, Subversion and Absence (Identity – konstrukce, subverze a absence, Petr A. Bílek, Martin Procházka, Jan Wiendl, eds., Prague: Faculty of Arts of Charles University, 2014, 131 pp., ISBN 978–80–7308–530–8), which can be accessed electronically. The second interdisciplinary workshop focused on the broadly defined relationship “Utopias/Dystopias: Forms and Transformations in Arts Studies, Historical and Philological Disciplines”. It was organized according to the individual sub- programmes of the 9th research programme: Transformations in the Cultural History of Anglophone Countries: Identities, Periods and Canons; Pulp Literature: The “Trivial” and “Debased” Genres and Forms; Culture and Totalitarianism; and Methodology of Editorial Work. While the structure of the previous volume copies that of the research programme, this book follows a different pattern across the boundaries between individual research teams, thus approaching the form of a collaborative monograph. Based on a chronological arrangement of topics, it aims to establish a framework for the confrontation of diverse issues related to the theme of utopia/dystopia in the context of Anglophone literatures and cultures, within the framework of Czech literature, with respect to its relations to the Francophone area, in relation to the history of art media and from the perspective of more general historiographical contexts. The introductory chapter by the literary historian and translator Josef Hrdlička is entitled “Exiles in the Future Homeland: the Utopian Places of Romantic and Post- romantic Poetry” and focuses on selected representations of utopian places in poetry. The question of the genesis of the poetic utopia is viewed, among others, with regard to Peter Burke's proposition about the gradual separation of “high” literature from the rest of literary production and its consequent loss of a wider readership, or, more precisely, of the relationship to the audience in general. In the works of selected poets (Friedrich Hölderlin, Charles Baudelaire and Karel Hynek Mácha), Hrdlička proceeds from the absence of a readership/community to its imaginary constitution by means of discursive strategies in individual poems. The chapter concludes by discussing the nature of these utopias, which might differ even within the work of a single author. “Utopias of Love, Industry and Knowledge: The Ideals of Mid- Nineteenth Century Czech Society” is a chapter authored by two literary historians, Petra Hesová and Václav Vaněk. It focuses in particular on the situation of the 1840s, the decade in which a specific sense of future emerged in Czech society, namely the time of the first inquiries into the meaning of the Czech nation's existence and its aims. As a response to these inquiries, the first theoretical projects and projections of the future started to appear. However, these are always determined either by disciplinary (K. S. Amerling, J. E. Purkyně) or ideological frameworks (F. M. Klácel, K. Sabina, A. Smetana). Their rather vague notions contrast with Bolzano's treatise “On the Best State”, whose effect on the Czech background was, however, significantly limited. The authors conclude that manifestations of utopianism in Czech society had outlasted the year 1848 and are found in the form of fiction (J. J. Kollár, K. Sabina) until the early 1860s, when Czech society opened a space for an independent articulat |
