The paper interprets the novel Rivers of Babylon (1991) by Peter Pišťanek in the context of the postmodernism analysis by Frederick Jameson and the statements on the End of History by F. Fukuyama. It does not reconstruct only the reception of the novel but also the period discussions about the stratification of the genres of contemporary Slovak prose, which was conditioned by challenging historicity as well as historical awareness. The novel by P. Pišťanek is characterized here as a text which in the context of period Slovak literature manifested the attributes of postmodernism in the way they were defined by F. Jameson in his book Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) – these include „historical deafness“, „depthlessness“, „waning of effect“, as well as postmodern irony created in the form of pastiche. At the same time it also thematizes the situation of Slovak society at the moment of the political transformation when the structures of the old system are collapsing and a new one is being established. This is the moment which defines the modification of the genre structures of the novel which control the central syuzhet line of the novel linked to the protagonist, Rácz. Pišťanek´s text can be regarded as a travesty of Bildungsroman, based on a story of integrating in society, on accepting the state of the world. In this case the integration of the protagonist takes place in the era of „End of History“, the loss of trustworthiness of any norms. In the novel there are parallels in Fukuyama´s reflections on society after the End of History, especially in those points that do not sound so triumphant or optimistic as their fundamental proposition, saying that what will stir the social process is the struggle for recognition. In these moments the central theme of the novel can be interpreted in the context of Hegel´s master-slave dialectic.
This paper considers the problem of the woman’s development in Fráňa Šrámek’s Tělo with reference to the Bildungsroman tradition and to the evolution of this German genre. I attempt to show that the maturation process of Tělo’s protagonist Máňa Švarcová, in contrast to the man’s maturation associated with the intellect, is limited to the sphere of the body. Although corporeality usually has negative connotations, in this novel it becomes the main — and the only accessible — site of the heroine’s power. Using Esther Kleinbord Labovitz and Susan Fraiman’s argument that the plot of “the female Bildungsroman” is distorted, I seek the reasons for this predicament and the indicators of female identity construction. Moreover, I focus on the issue of gender and the social roles that not only impose specific obligations on women but also shape the path of their development. Máňa Švarcová’s development, I suggest, begins upon her marriage and takes place within the boundaries defined by this institution. Because she follows a path of development approved by her society, she puts her own identity in the shadow and creates a “pseudo-identity” (Erich Fromm’s term) that functions as a mask for the society. The real identity stays undeveloped due to impossibility of reconciling the society’s expectations and individual — in this case female — freedom, which is dominated by the male element in the novel. Thus the heroine is arrested in a state of “unreadiness,” a term proposed by Ewa Paczoska for defining many modern protagonists. Consequently, her maturation process is inevitably lost in the patriarchal world.
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