The paper is focused on contact points of different paradigms in the works of Samuel Beckett (1906-989). Using the example of his early experimental prose (Murphy, 1938; Watt, 1944), the paper explores Beckett's problematic position in the context of the modernist project and the transition to postmodernism: the overlapping/fading of modernist optimism (the effort to erase the gap between the language and the objects denominates) and the rise of postmodern scepticism (the fundamental inadequacy of the language.
One of the important cultural events of the second half of the 50's was the foundation and activities of the Mikulás Galanda Group and the same can be said about the non-public exhibitions of the loose circle of Bratislava's Confrontations, taking place in the beginning of the 60's. Even if their activities remained unaccompanied by the avant-garde gesture of the programmatic manifesto in the strict sense of the word, they did produce some introductory statements and, above all, significant exhibitions. H. Belting in his book, entitled 'The End of Art History', claimed that the European tradition created a historical cycle, reaching from the times of ancient Greece and Rome till modernity, using the so-called 'cultural archive'. All innovations arise outside of this archive or as its competition. The acceptance of the innovations then means acceptance into the archive of cultural memory. To understand the intent of the above mentioned cultural events we have to deal with the following questions: 1. What was the nature of the respective cultural contexts of the Mikulás Galanda Group and its foundation and the exhibitions of the Bratislava Confrontations group? 2. Can their activities be described as innovation within late modernity? 3. In what sense, intensity and extent were works of art, representing innovation, also an act of artistic experiment? Members of both groups have found themselves inside the cultural archive for a short period of time during the second half of the 60's. That means that in the years od the ideological 'thaw' they relinquished a part of their gesture of revolt in favor of the strategy of reinforcing the closeness of artistic programs of a rather wide and disparate 'cultural front'. Of course, at the end of the sixties they abruptly found themselves outside the cultural archive, which was then being painted in the protective red colour. The 'return' to the archive of cultural memory at the beginning of the 90‘s seemed to be triumphant. Yet it was impossible to engage the young generation from within the cultural archive. The young generation did not believe in the autonomy of the modern art, had no faith in tradition, seeing it only as a deposit to be cited, appropriated, for anything goes... Thus Y. Lotman's axiom: if we look forward, we see incidents, if we look backwards, we see regularities... we serve as an optical device revealing that both events of Slovak figurative art in the 50's and 60's conclude the period of late modernism, naturally in the Slovak way.
The Lyotard's thesis about the fall of Great Narrations is the starting point of above analysis. It caused deconstruction of the Enlightenment project of education centered upon the idea of a subject. As a result of the above the theoreticians of pedagogics retract from constructing positive projects and pedagogics becomes the 'quasi project about impossibility of education'. In that vacancy great corporations carry out discourses, which integrates subjects upon the idea of consumption and which should be analysed critically.
The first part of the article presents the advancement of the studies in literary onomastics, particularly focusing on the so-called breakthrough periods, important for the development of this discipline. The second part concentrates on the analysis of the onymy of a number of selected prose texts, especially the novel by Stefan Chwin Zloty pelikan ('Golden Pelican'). Its aim is to show a potential direction of the development in the methodology of onomastic studies, including the latest findings of the contemporary literary studies, especially the theory of literature.
The article concerns the problem of the crisis of Utopia. Many philosophers and social scientists speak about 'the death of Utopia'. This opinion is closely related to the theory of 'the end of ideology', which was very popular after World War II. Researchers often show that great projects envisaging a radical transformation of society have revealed their destructive power. Moreover, contemporary culture, and especially post-modernist philosophy place emphasis on the temporariness, instability and 'liquidity' of the scheme of social life. So they leave no room for the constitutive elements of Utopian thinking: the overall and enduring projects of the construction of a perfect social order. The article poses the basic question: are Utopian ideas completely absent from the post-modernist vision of society, or do those ideas assume a different character? The author shows some elements of Utopian thinking existing at the level of individual culture. Utopia in its traditional sense has completely disappeared. This does not mean, however, that there is no form of Utopian reflection in contemporary post-modernist society. It appears in a completely new form: the search for a perfect social order has been replaced by a multitude of various ways of looking for a perfect life in the individual dimension.
The author diagnoses the condition of the humanities today, referring to the conclusions of its avantgarde movements, mainly postmodernism. The loss within these movements of the basic epistemological categories — such as objectivity, reality, truth, experience or symbol — causes a referential break between language and being. This state of affairs gives rise to research controversies and thought aberrations that undermine the authority of the humanities and the sense of their practice. These controversies are by no means an innovation of our times. They appeared on numerous occasions in the history of thought and — speaking more broadly — culture, with the “monastic” (experimental) style and the “qualitative” (speculative) style marking their ascendancy or descent to the scholarly underworld with greater or lesser force. What undoubtedly characterises the humanities today is the extent to which obvious cognitive absurdities masquerading as science throw theirweight around, absurdities stemming from seemingly innocent premises, such as the use of inventiveness, paralogy, narrativeness, etc. in research. Their worldview-related consequences leading through tolerance to relativism lead to a ban on the application of axiological procedures and on the reference of a worked-out conceptuality to extra-linguistic reality. This turns out to be dangerous not only to cognition as such but also to the sense of human existence. That is why a return to the monastic style and, as part of it, essential cognition and practices of presence (e.g. directness of experience, the so-called “ontological call” not being ignored by the scholar) based on symbolic-spiritual exercises bringing to mind the ancient idea of humanitas and the horizon of universal values, can lend support to the crisis-ridden humanities and humanists.
The study focuses on the issues of the end of postmodernism in relation to changes and trends in contemporary art and theory. The author tries to approach what comes after postmodernism using several various contemporary theoretical concepts by Alan Kirby, Jeffrey T. Nealon and Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. The author then relates these concepts to novels of contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq. Finding the connections to the concepts of intensification and comodification, as well as New Romanticism, author confirms that Houellebecq is a writer, who cannot be reliably classified as postmodern author, but rather the author of era of transition.
The aim of the paper was to examine how the art historian topic of mannerism has been constructed in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet bloc. In the case of Czech art history a discourse on the subject was almost entirely conditioned by the local specifics of art history and cultural traditions. The study follows chronologically major authors and their interpretation of mannerism (Max Dvořák, Jaromír Neumann, Eliška Fučíková, Pavel Preiss).
The article deals with relations between modernism and postmodernism in large cultural and historical framework. Postmodernism here is not understand as continuation or as negation of modernism, but as a 'jin jang' energy, fertilizes each other, rises and fades out together. Author does not work with notions postmodernism and modernism as with cultural-sociable phenomenon typical for Euro-American society, but as an opposition of understanding of those phenomenon in strictly territorial determination. It is not territorial phenomenon but historical phenomenon determined by interactions between East and West. Author uses to describe postmodern situation in European literatures with term 'change of the rules of the game' as deviation of European literature from genre-typological agreements. Today this change manifests in certain syncretism and fictional autobiography of the huge amount of the European literatures, influenced by Eastern poetic and semantic structures, and also by the Nonwestern philosophical tradition.
Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), by a Canadian writer Timothy Findley, challenges the biblical story of the Great Flood providing a postmodern, an alternative and a postcolonial version 'writing back to the colonial empire'. In Findley's reconfiguration offering a story of the Other and describing a practical side of the enterprise, dr Noah becomes a tyrannical leader of a totalitarian state who instead of salvation offers destruction. His vision of the better world excludes various Others of the novel, mainly women and animals, but also those who fail to be contained in binary oppositions. It is the lower orders who embrace difference as the ark becomes a battlefield between the male and female discourses, the powers of reason and imagination, intolerance and tolerance, as well as death and life. In a way characteristic of other novels by Timothy Findley, Not Wanted on the Voyage provides an exploration of fascism. This heteroglot magic realist text revisions the politics of the chooser and the chosen, the dispossessed and the privileged, or the belonging and the unbelonging. Thus, Not Wanted on the Voyage may be read as a postmodern literary commentary on difference by showing the construction of diversity and its ideological foundations, as well as the dangers of failing to accept multiplicity.
Constructivism is an anti-positivistic position pursued in many branches of social sciences and the humanities. In philosophy of science this position is identified by the tenet of the object of research. Regardless whether it be a social world or the posterity, or the physical world, it is not external reality independent of the cognising subject, but a product of the process of construction or constituting. Some authors equate constructivism with postmodernism. Other authors profess more moderate relativistic views and point out that there are credible considerations that are used to constrain the process of constituting or construction
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The study analyses the metamorphoses of the phenomenon of religion at the secular age. It analyses more precisely the intensifying process of the individualization of religion. It is based on the concept of the non-existent secularization as metanarrative. Post-modern society has been undergoing extensive secularization on the one hand but on the other hand religion has been experiencing resurgence within the public arena (de-privatization of religion). New cults engaging in de-traditionalization and deinstitutionalization are being formed; faith is experiencing deregulation, and religious symbols and various levels of transcendence are invoked applying liberal logic. Deregulated and liberally chosen religious approaches epitomize the particular dialectics of individualization and de-individualization, i. e. they represent an attempt at a parallel individual and societal spiritual metamorphosis.
'Slucaj Harms', a short story written by Dubravka Ugresic is an example of postmodern realization of an old and having its own traditional rules epistolary novel. There are two versions of the story. One appeared as the afterword to Ugresic's translation of short stories by Daniil Charms, the second version was published thirteen years later in a collection 'Ziivot je bajka'. Both versions have a common main character, and sender of the letters, crazy translator Vodka U, who under the influence of Charms' short stories begins to imitate his style and adopts his personality. In this pervasive way, Ugresic realizes Barthes' 'death of the author' idea and plays with (un)originality. She raises questions about copying and plagiarism. Intertextual reading of the story leads to Russian avant-garde, especially to the fathers of Oberia school, of which Charms was a member.
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A game, just like social interaction, implies a specific set of rules that all participants must obey. However, the setting of strict rules and their implementation can destroy the fun of playing, because a game is also frivolous and relaxed fun. Similarly, when it comes to social interaction. It also needs a particular space where every move is not predetermined. I want to argue that the contemporary crisis of social interaction comes among other things from the fact that as 'postmodern machines' we have lost in our everyday social communication what characterizes a 'good game' - frivolity and freedom.
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This article investigates how the hypothesis of a plural reality is manifest in the fictional world of Urmedved (Ur-bear-novel, 1999), a work by Jiri Kratochvil (b. 1940). He employs for this purpose the theoretical concept of Postmodern fiction as an expression of a style that foregrounds the ontological structure, which was developed by Brian McHale, and the model of the narrative universe, as constructed by Marie-Laure Ryan. The analysis of these premisses of Postmodern fiction is aimed chiefly at the recursive narrative structure of the novel, which enables the disruption of the ontological boundaries or the bridging of narrative levels of different ontological status. McHale's theoretical concept of the ontological dominant is explained by employing Lyotard's hypothesis about mistrust of metanarratives. Because metanarratives are based on the premiss of a single accessible reality, a single real world, this loss does not merely mean the loss of trust in ideology, but also disrupts the need for a single real world. Moreover, this need is important for us as human beings - it reveals itself to be the organization of discontinuous entities into coherent wholes (as in the case of myth). Kratochvil's Urmedved reveals the ideological abuse of the need for a single reality, while undermining this human need. Postmodern fiction may destabilize the metanarrative by laying bare the contrivedness that distances from reality an individual member of the society veiled in the metanarrative. By the very nature of the need for one real world, however, the metanarrative remains dear to us.
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In traditional modernistic pedagogy one question has been asked: Is there education adequate to reality? Postmodernist questioning of traditional understanding of reality leads to the question about virtuality of education, i.e. about preparing a human being to cooperate with reality which is understood as something transitional between the real world, though yet unborn, and the desired and imagined world. The article presents the issue in the context of Jean-Françoise Lyotard's postmodernist philosophy.
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.
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The paper critically examines three extremely successful examples of historical postmodernism in contemporary Serbian literature: Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1984), Radoslav Petković’s Destiny, Annotated (1993) and Goran Petrović’s The Siege of the Church of Holy Salvation (1997). All three novels take historical events as the basis of an archaeological narrative, but they also question the notion of history which itself is, of course, historical and political. Therefore, we have to (re)construct the context of the 1990s when nationalism needed a new “imagined community” ready to deal with the challenges of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, post communism and capitalism. Thus it seems that these novels invite magic realism as a possible way out from history, or even better, a way into a “new” history.
The starting point for reflections on the paradoxes of Christian culture is Nietzsche’s announcement of the “death of God” and an increasingly common belief that European culture has ceased to seek its inspiration in Christianity. It seems, however, that the paradoxical tension between continuity and break is part of the very essence of Christianity with its constant oscillation between, to use H.R. Niebuhr’s terminology, the poles of Christ and culture. The coming together of the ambivalent symbols of the root and the salt, mentioned in the title, culminates in the figure of the cross embodying the seemingly contradictory but in fact inseparable relations of culture and Christianity: rootedness and uprootedness. Biblical, early Christian (The Epistle to Diognetus) and contemporary (Simone Weil) texts, read in the context of 20th-century missionary testimonies (Trappist monks of Tibhirine), reveal a possibility of once again making the Christian demand for universalism part of the postmodern, multicultural world.
The article deals with the metamorphosis of Ukrainian literature after 1989. The author is focusing on the constitution of the postmodern discourse in Ukrainian literature and its implementation in the sphere of the academic criticism. The postmodern tendencies in the Ukrainian literature become visible at the end of the 1960s and at the beginning of the 1970s in the texts of the New York Group (E. Andijevska, V. Vovk, Zh. Vasylkivska, P. Kylyna, J. Tarnavskyj, B. Rubchak and B. Bojchuk), 'chimerical novel' (H. Pahutak, V. Nazarenko, O. Lysheha) and the group of the writers (V. Petrov, I. Bahrjanyj, U. Samchuk, T. Osmachka, J. Malanjuk, J. Sherekh etc.). At the end of the 1980s the definitive leaning to the poetics of the postmodernism became conspicuous in the texts of Jurij Andrukhovych, Viktor Neborak and Oleksander Irvanets from Bu-Ba-Bu. In the 1990s, a number of the new literary groups belonging to the discursive sphere of postmodernism and neomodernism came into being: New Degeneration, Lu-Ho-Sad, Dogs of St. Georgy etc. The author also deals with the works of the writers adherent to regime of writing of so called 'social clinic', stream of the consciousness, visual poetry and feminism. In the center of the author's interest stands the perception and reinterpretation of the phenomena of popculture which became dominant in the texts of the Ukrainian writers at the end of the 1990s.
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