Milan Kundera and his “Central European” path to worldliness

As opposed to Terry Eagleton who in Salmagundi politicizes the aesthetics of Kundera's fiction Eagleton sees Kundera's war against kitsch as assault on triumphalistic sentimentality which is Stalinism's ideological stock-in-trade (31)Milan Kundera himself has insisted that his novels, like all novels, be received aesthetically rather than politically. In Sixty-three Words, under Misomusist, he condemns an intellectual, sophisticated misomusy that takes revenge on art by forcing it to a purpose beyond the aesthetic. The doctrine of engage art: art as instrument of (Art 140). About The Joke, Kundera writes: Ludvik's fundamental anthropological experience . . . has historical roots, but the description of the history itself (the role of the Party, the bases of terror, the organization of social institutions, etc.) does not interest me, and you will not find it in the novel (Art 37). As if attempting to forestall Eagleton, Kundera begins his preface to The Joke with, When in 1980, during a television panel discussion devoted to my works, someone called The Joke 'a minor indictment of Stalinism,' I was quick to interject, 'Spare me your Stalinism, please. The Joke is a love story!' (xi). Perhaps the best we can do in locating the politics of Kundera's novels is to take our lead from his own paradoxical assessment of the political import of Kafka's novels that it lies precisely in their 'nonengagement,' that is to say, in their total autonomy from all programs, ideological concepts, and futurological prognoses (Art 116-17). Kundera, then, is perhaps insofar as he is not Political. His reflections on literature would indicate that his concern is not with public but with private life (The Joke is a love story!) in all its aesthetic opacity. But how does he conceive of personal relations?

IntroductionLe motif de la mre est rcurrent dans les nombreuses oeuvres de Milan Kundera.Mres et enfants tablissent mutuellement une relation hirarchique et tentent de limiter sans cesse l'acte de l'autre.Un conflit psychique vcu par les personnages dans cette situation oppressive, met en exergue leur dsirs et contours.Cependant, on ne pourrait pas dire qu'assez d'tudes prcdentes se sont penches sur ce rle de mre chez ce romancier.Certes, la reprsentation de femmes a fait l'objet en particulier du point de vue fministe.Nous pourrions considrer Milan Kundera & Feminism.Dangerous intersections (1995) de John O'Brien comme l'une des tudes reprsentatives.Comme nous le verrons plus loin en dtail, il a mis en vidence l'attitude ambivalente de Kundera l'gard des reprsentations fminines, c'est--dire la contradiction entre ses expressions misogynes et ses propos conscients sur ces disproportions.En passant par l'analyse d'O'Brien qui a vis examiner l'image de la femme , nous nous focaliserons sur celui de la mre .Nous commencerons par constater des critiques et des analyses sur la reprsentation fminine chez Kundera et passerons en suite la rflexion dtaille des romans, en particulier Risibles amours (1968), La vie est ailleurs (1973) et L'Insoutenable Lgret de l'tre (1984) dans l'ordre chronologique de leur publication.Ces examens nous permettront de dlimiter la typologie de la mre chez Kundera.En plus, nous aborderons la fonction que les mres occupent dans le monde kundrien.Elles donnent au protagoniste des motivations de l'action et, en d'autres termes, engendrent le dynamisme qui dveloppe l'intrique romanesque.Nous claircirons comment l'crivain met en marche ce dispositif bas sur le rle de genre.

Now widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, the Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin was silenced by political censorship and persecution for most of his life. In After Bakhtin, David Lodge sketches Bakhtin's extraordinary career, and explores the relevance of his ideas - on the dialogic nature of language, on the typology of fictional discourse, and on the carnivalesque - to the writings of authors as diverse as George Eliot, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Fay Weldon and Martin Amis. Further essays study particular texts - by Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling and Milan Kundera - illustrative of the development of the novel in its classic, modernist and postmodernist phases. Two final essays reflect on the current state of academic criticism.

Ivanova ambitiously proposes and successfully manages to read Philip Roth’s and Milan Kundera’s works along comparatistic lines. The comparison between Milan Kundera and Philip Roth is certainly not new and stems directly from the two authors’ knowing each other personally (starting in the 1970s). Roth wrote the introduction to Kundera’s Laughable Loves back in 1974, he dedicated The Ghost Writer (1979) to him and invokes his presence mentioning his name in The Human Stain in 2000. The most n...

Kundera's characters have always struggled both with images and identities they have constructed for themselves and that others have constructed for them. Since Milan Kundera's emigration to France, much of his fiction has explored such struggles through dialogical split between youthful characters who live in the fragile world of lyrical self-expression and definition, and cynical narrator, literary representative of the author, who resides in world of political realities and external definition of individuals. As readers have become used to Kundera's technique of self disclosing narrative, many have quite naturally associated the Kundera who inhabits his fiction with the writer himself. Nesmrtelnost (Immortality, 1991) does not accept such familiarity between reader and author; the novel seems to shake finger at those who confuse writer with the image created through his or her work. This is accomplished by implicating the falsity of human perception in both seemingly real and visibly fictional worlds through the juxtaposition of the plausible against the artificial and by drawing attention to our subjectivity in reference to early formalist polemics. Self-disclosing narratives such as those employed by Kundera function by making what is normally covert, overt. Fiction becomes game between author and reader. Immortality plays with the reader's perceptions by creating three tiered fictional world which consists of what appear to be three possible worlds. The first, the world of the self disclosing narrator, Milan Kundera, is the highly believable and recognizable world of contemporary Paris. It is this world that seems to guide the reader through the text. The second, the world of the characters, is avowedly artificial, though it is born out of familiar elements brought from the first world. Immorality's third possible world is the amorphous realm of the immortals where the likes of Hemmingway and Goethe meet to discuss their fates, i.e., images of them constructed out of popular opinion. The novel's narrator gains our trust as readers, and then shocks us by allowing the three tiers to collide, thus drawing attention to the artificiality of all fictional worlds, as well as the frailty of our perceptions in the actual world. Kundera's narrators typically provide background material regarding pertinent historical and literary information. In the case of Immortality, the novel is peppered with myriad allusions to twentieth-century literary polemics, in particular certain ideas of the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky. Shklovsky sought to combat nineteenth-century Positivism and the often quoted and, to be fair, misquoted, ideas of Potebnya's is thinking in images.3 In the fictional world of Immortality, characters think and view literature and the world around them in terms of images. The narration, however, is constructed in terms of Shklovsky's ideals for art as propounded in Art as Device. Shklovsky's argument, briefly stated, is that the habitual way of thinking is to make the unfamiliar as easily digestible as possible. Normally our perceptions are automatic, which is way of saying that they are minimal... Since perception is usually too automatic, art develops variety of techniques to impede perception, or at least to call attention to themselves.4 It is in this study that Shklovsky identified series of literary devices that shaped the way generation of scholars read literature and writers composed fiction. Such devices are employed in Immortality in self-conscious manner. These techniques include: ostranenie (defamiliarization), a device by which phenomenon is taken out of its conventional context so that it may once again be seen, not merely recognized; zatrudnennaia forma (defacilitation), any device that forces the reader or listener to follow the text with an intense conscious effort and to wonder about its meaning..., and (lastly) obnazhennie priema (laying bare the device). …

This article explores the tentative notion of spa literature morphing into the heterogeneous body of the transnational and pan-European ‘sanatorial text’ and proposes the notion that this text body consists of different ‘primal scenes’ (Ned Lukacher), which can be viewed as ‘a trope for reading’. The aim of this article is to use Lukacher’s concept of primal scenes as a reading lens for decoding two swimming pool scenes in Milan Kundera’s novel Valčik na rozloučenou (1970–1971; Farewell Waltz, first published in English as The Farewell Party, transl. P. Kussi 1972) and Bohumil Hrabal’s Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (1971; I Served the King of England, transl. Paul R. Wilson 1989). Both novels address the interactions between hotel and spa personnel and their guests, revealing the gender and bio-politics in this sphere and turning it into a contested field of both transnational interests and politics of national identity. The close temporal proximity in which the two novels were written and the almost mirror-inverted architecture of the two scenes provide substantial basis for their comparative analysis. The analysis sheds new light on the intertextual connections between the two works and uncovers writers’ strategies for the sanatorial text as a broader concept.

In addition to being a widely recognized novelist, Milan Kundera has also authored three pieces for theatre: The Owners of the Keys (Majitelé klíčů 1961), The Blunder (Ptákovina 1967), and Jacques and his Master (Jakub a jeho pán 1971). In recent years, however, the hypothesis has been raised that Kundera was the true author of a fourth play, Juro Jánošík, first performed in a 1974 production under the name of Karel Steigerwald, who was Kundera’s student at the time. In this study, we make use of supervised machine learning to settle the question of authorship attribution in the case of Juro Jánošík, with results strongly supporting the hypothesis of Kundera’s authorship.

Machine translation (MT) is preferred by many translators because it is fast and convenient; it provides time savings especially in the production of high-volume technical texts. However, in contexts where cultural and linguistic nuance is decisive, particularly in literary translation, the importance of human intervention continues. In this study, based on the example of a published translation book, a translation practice produced through an MT+post-editing workflow without knowledge of the source language was examined in terms of translation quality. The analyzed work is Milan Kundera: Une Vie d’Écrivain by Jean-Dominique Brierre. This biography was translated into Turkish and published under the title Bir Yazarın Hayatı: Milan Kundera by Osman Akınhay, through his publishing house Angora Kitaplığı. Due to the scope of the article, the research was limited to direct quotations selected through purposive sampling; these quotations, selected from seven of Kundera’s works, were examined comparatively between published human translations and Akınhay’s translation. The evaluation was conducted on the basis of the criteria of fluency, semantic accuracy, and contextual appropriateness, using an approach that draws on the MQM (Multidimensional Quality Metrics) framework; the elements identified in each example were reported at Minor/Major/Critical levels. The findings showed that, in the examined examples, the translation is generally fluent and contextually appropriate; however, they also showed that greater caution is required regarding semantic accuracy, particularly due to nuance shifts that emerge in certain verbs and evaluative expressions.

SummaryA couple who indulge in a tongue-in-cheek game of pretence soon discover that role-play can, in fact, reveal more about themselves – their real selves – and their partner, than it conceals. What begins on a whim as an indulgent and innocent bit of sport soon spirals out of control to threaten the dynamics of the couple's relationship, increasingly hampering their ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy. The authors of this article contend that Milan Kundera's “The Hitchhiking Game”, one of seven short stories in the anthology Laughable Loves (1974), benefits from being read in terms of Roger Caillois's (1967) taxonomy of games and play, which differentiates between competition, chance, mimicry and vertigo in respect of players’ attitudes towards play. This theory is expanded by Wolfgang Iser (1993), who relates these four categories to the analysis of texts, introducing the concept of textual games. Employing the mimicry—chance binary seems particularly apt for this story as it highlights the unlimited potential for sustained illusion, as opposed to the limitations imposed by the finite nature of the text and the characters’ eventual disillusionment. In this tale of erotic love, the laughter hinted at in the title of the anthology is revealed to be rather wry, personal identity is shown to be ambiguous, and love often appears to be tainted by uncertainty.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten. Milan Kundera “I think therefore I am” is the statement of an intellectual...

Reviews 265 pornographique”(47). Cette première contribution se penche sur les traits communs, malgré la diversité des textes, qui forment ce que le critique appelle “l’érographie féminine”. En mettant l’accent sur l’importance du dire érotique féminin, Brulotte annonce un aspect étudié dans de nombreux chapitres: la subversion des écrits de femmes. Que cette subversion s’exprime à travers le désir amoureux, l’obscénité, les déviations sexuelles, la vengeance (comme dans le film Baise-moi), la “cruauté” et “la dépravation” d’un “érotisme africain” (289) (comme dans Femme nue, femme noire de Calixthe Beyala) ou à travers la contestation des sociétés patriarcales, en particulier chez des auteures maghrébines,elle a pour but de montrer que la sexualité,l’appropriation du corps et le regard sur l’autre ne relèvent plus exclusivement du dire masculin. Dans l’ensemble, l’étude de l’œuvre de divers auteurs ou cinéastes (d’Annie Ernaux à Catherine Breillat en passant par Assia Djebar, Milan Kundera, Marie-Sissi Labrèche et autres) met en lumière que l’Éros, qu’il soit porté à l’écran ou mis en récit, qu’il soit lié au pathos ou au thanatos, est complexe et toujours multiple. University of Vermont Ching Selao Pouzet-Duzer,Virginie. L’impressionnisme littéraire. Saint-Denis: PU de Vincennes, 2013. ISBN 978-2-84292-365-5. Pp. 349. 24 a. Declaring that, for her, what makes literary impressionism a compelling area of investigation is its existence as a paradigm that contradicts all notions of category, Pouzet-Duzer uses a combination of rhetorical,cultural, sociological,and phenomenological approaches to elucidate the complex interactions among the theories and creations of late nineteenth-century writers (journalists, critics, novelists, poets) and painters whose work exists within the fluid boundaries of this artistic current. Close readings of paintings and texts are juxtaposed with broad overviews, and this continual change in focus, in tandem with the variety of critical approaches, puts the reader in a position to experience the hesitations and fluctuations of what Pouzet-Duzer calls “le morcellement esthétique de toute une époque” (315). The first part of the study examines portraits by Manet and Degas of various writers of their acquaintance.While many critics place these two painters at the margins of impressionism, Pouzet-Duzer justifies her choice on two grounds: 1) the oft-claimed independence of the painters now identified as impressionists, which created a movement with no clearly defined or recognized center, and 2) the historical and theoretical import of Duranty’s 1876 study of “the new painting,” which represented Degas as the ideal impressionist, followed by Mallarmé’s focus on Manet in his study of impressionism later the same year. Much has been written about the friendships among writers and painters of this era and the portraits that ensued, but Pouzet-Duzer’s focus on Manet and Degas brings to the fore the oft-overlooked importance of writers such as Duranty and Astruc. Her analyses of the canvases she calls“portraits des artistes en écrivains”(15) are nuanced and insightful, enhanced by the number, quality, and placement of the reproductions that accompany them. One of the most original and intriguing aspects of these analyses is her contention that the representation of the various writers’hands reflects not just their common métier, but the stylistic differences among them. The second part of the book,“Capturer l’insaisissable: la main et l’œil,” looks at the presence and development of impressionism in literature by focusing on texts by writers as diverse as Zola and Mallarmé. It begins by examining early critical judgments by Brunetière and Lanson, thematic similarities between paintings and texts of the same era, and, via close readings of passages from the Goncourts and Daudet, stylistic similarities and differences between l’écriture artiste and l’impressionnisme littéraire. Pouzet-Duzer also considers the aptness of different genres—novel, interior monologue, poetry, affiches— to impressionist treatment and applies twentieth-century critical notions such as reader response to a variety of late nineteenth-century texts. She concludes that while literary impressionism shares common points with all of the nineteenth-century -ismes, and that...

This article compares two writers, Milan Kundera and Breyten Breytenbach, who, while both addressing conditions of social oppression – in communist Czechoslovakia and apartheid South Africa, respectively – reveal similarities of “double vision” concerning what is home and what is exile. Both have been classified as postmodern according to their fictive, experimental forms of expression. But, I argue, their postmodernism is grounded in geo-political realities identifiable as postcolonial. Following the quotation by Quayson, the reading resists any easy separation of the two “posts” of our time, and offers a model of interpretation that, by analogy, may be applied to several writers whose art – signalling the play of the imagination, irreverence and self-referentiality – emanates from a historical burden.

Identity in The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

The aims and claims of this collection are ambitious. It sets out to shed new light on the field of the erotic in contemporary French and francophone literature and culture through a critical approach that conjoins eroticism and myth. In so doing it purports to renew women's studies, and, more broadly, gender studies, within the French and francophone worlds. Over its fourteen chapters it aims to map new tendencies in current erotic writing by both women and men. The volume's foundational apparatus (an Introduction and a lengthy first chapter on ‘La Crise de l'éternel féminin’ in contemporary francophone erotic texts by women) covers some of the key works, authors, and developments that have become closely associated over the last twenty years with a new era of frank and experimental sexual writing. While interesting, these introductory essays rehearse much that is already known and do not offer new critical paradigms. For the main part, subsequent chapters focus on female creators (only one chapter, on Michel Houellebecq, is devoted to a male writer). Some fairly familiar arguments are made in chapters on Catherine Breillat, Annie Ernaux, Calixthe Beyala, and Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. Also covered are the erotic writings of Gabriel Osmonde (Andreï Makine's alter ego); the intermingling of erotic and political registers in Milan Kundera and Nancy Huston; the influence of the father in the unfolding of desire in Houellebecq and Nina Bouaroui; and the self-destructive and toxic eroticism of protagonists in the work of québécoise writer Marie-Sissi Labrèche. There are chapters, too, that have a broader scope, setting out to examine, for example, the expression of sexuality in Moroccan women's writing; the body and sensuality in Algerian women's writing; sexuality as it emerges from, and remains tainted by, slavery in Antillean literature. All chapters offer coherent readings, but several remain somewhat underdeveloped in terms of critical apparatus. Many of the arguments made in this volume are already very well covered in the wealth of secondary literature that has been published to date, in French and in English, on the core corpus. Most surprisingly, relatively little of this material is referenced or engaged with. Finally, the idea of myth does not emerge from the essays as systematically as one might expect. It is taken up via a general interest in how selected authors and texts deconstruct certain myths about gender and unpick normative views — thus Ernaux evokes and works against myths of feminine passivity; Houellebecq explodes myths of love; Despentes, of heteronormative culture; Breillat, of the obscenity that accretes to woman's body — yet these gestures scarcely feel new. Ultimately, while the volume captures a sense of the recent proliferation of sexually explicit works and the ways in which these have destabilized preconceptions, it does not quite live up to the claims it makes for itself.

Over the past two years, Egypt has been neglected by the "Sublime Planetary Historic News Event," to use Milan Kundera's expression.1 Tahrir Square in Cairo, once celebrated as the emblematic site of an "Arab revolution" propagated through the Internet and social media, has been vacated by its globalized youth. We no longer understand what is going on in the biggest Arab country in the Muslim world—with a population of over 90 million—as if everyone had the vague feeling that they had been misled by the spinning wheels of image and commentary.KeywordsPresidential ElectionParliamentary ElectionMuslim BrotherhoodRegistered VoterEgyptian SocietyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.