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Crossing the boundaries of a single-author study, this book uncovers Flann O'Brien's attempt to forge a commercially successful Irish literary project from international avant-garde influences. Situating O'Brien's early work within a global context, the book uses new evidence of his collaborations to reimagine him as a networked writer. O'Brien drew upon experimental techniques to generate new categories of writing, rethink Irish culture and reach a wide audience. This study illuminates a network of cultural production around O'Brien, linking his work to English comic magazines, Dadaist photomontage, Expressionism, Central European theatre, and renowned writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka. By re-examining Flann O'Brien within the context of the momentous global political and cultural crises that spurred avant-garde experimentation, the book also rewrites the cultural history of Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s.
Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it provides a new reading of imprisonment suggesting it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity instead.
The cultural liberalization of communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s produced many artistic accomplishments, not least the celebrated films of the Czech New Wave. This movement saw filmmakers use their new freedom to engage with traditions of the avant-garde, especially Surrealism. This book explores the avant-garde's influence over the New Wave and considers the political implications of that influence. The close analysis of selected films, ranging from the Oscar-winning Closely Observed Trains to the aesthetically challenging Daisies, is contextualized by an account of the Czech avant-garde and a discussion of the films' immediate cultural and political background.
Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importanc...
A cultural history of the Czech people, examining the significance of the small central European nation's artistic, literary, and political developments from its origins through approximately 1960.
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