The Prague School and Lubomír Doležel’s Theory of Fictional Worlds

This article analyses the development of the sociology of culture in Czechia. Its focus is on the sociology of the arts and cultural sociology, which, it is argued, are connected through the notion of the relative autonomy of cultural structures. While the Czech sociology of culture may have been rendered less dynamic by the lack of a critical mass of sociologists specialising in this area and by the country’s frequent political upheavals and its isolation from the international circulation of ideas, it has experienced moments of considerable vitality. Three periods in the development of the field are identified here, each of them marked by a movement toward a stronger and more sociologically adequate conceptualisation of cultural autonomy: (1) from the diffuse culturalism of the field’s founding figures to the functionalist theory of the interwar sociologist Inocenc Arnošt Bláha, whose view of the relationship between art and society was influenced by the work of the Prague School of Structuralism; (2) from the cultural reductionism of Marxist-Leninist theory after 1948 to the eclectic sociology of culture and the arts of the late socialist period; (3) from the demise of this transitional form of a sociology of culture in the 1990s to the increasingly internationalised but also heterogeneous landscape of the 2010s, which is constituted by a semi-institutionalised centre of cultural sociology at Brno and small groups or individuals in Prague and other academic locales. The thread of continuity in an otherwise discontinuous historical development is found in the recurrent motif of the relative autonomy of culture which the Czech sociology of culture absorbed through its exposure to art and literary theory.

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Analyse des réseaux de personnages dans les textes de Leslie Kaplan : du postmodernisme à l’inconscient

French Cultural Studies ◽

10.1177/09571558211002449 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 095715582110024

Author(s):

Murielle El Hajj

Keyword(s):

Identity Crisis ◽

The Unconscious ◽

The Real ◽

The World ◽

Fictional Worlds ◽

Shed Light

The texts of Leslie Kaplan question the irreducible opposition between the real and the non-real. Her characters and their intentional absence confuse the repository and fictional worlds, not only to point out the thin margin between reality and fiction, but to underline the impossible delimitation between the real and the fictional, or even between the text and the world. This article studies the characters of Kaplan and aims to demonstrate their identity crisis through the study of their literary onomastic and the use of the neutral pronoun ‘it’ and allegoric expressions. In addition, the objective of this article is to shed light on the Kaplanian characters as Kunderian models, while stressing the particularity of their physionomy, which consists to present ‘fuzzy’ characters that are present and absent at the same time, engaging the reader in the fictional process as a try to complete the missing details. This article concludes that the Kaplanian characters are not only the prototypes of the postmodern being, but they are also introverted, psychopaths and a demonstration of different facets of the unconscious.

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Rheme before theme in the noun phrase

Studies in Language ◽

10.1075/sl.32.4.05vit ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 32 (4) ◽

pp. 894-915

Author(s):

Carlotta Viti

Keyword(s):

Noun Phrase ◽

Information Structure ◽

Ancient Greek ◽

New Information ◽

Prague School

Information structure in the noun phrase remains unexplored or limited to the study of the s-form and the of-form in English, which are interpreted from the perspective of the Prague School. Accordingly, the prenominal s-form is chosen if the possessor expresses old information; conversely, if the possessor expresses new information, the postnominal of-form is preferred. Ancient Greek, however, indicates that this is not the sole pattern attested. In our data, drawn from Herodotus, a postposed genitive refers to the topic of the immediately preceding clauses, and has no semantically compatible referent around it. Preposed genitives denote new or discontinuous participants, and are used in contrastive and emphatic contexts. In this case, the principle “rheme before theme” can be identified.

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‘Reading‘ and Directing the Play

New Theatre Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0266464x00015190 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 3 (11) ◽

pp. 218-223

Author(s):

Michael L. Quinn

Keyword(s):

San Francisco ◽

Doctoral Dissertation ◽

Original Function ◽

Preceding Article ◽

Production History ◽

Roman Jakobson ◽

Prague School

A director's ‘reading’ of the play – the hierarchical implications of which were discussed by Peter Holland in the preceding article – normally begins with just that: a reading, of the printed or typewritten text. Here. Michael Quinn discusses the various factors through which this initial acquaintance becomes a stage production carrying the stamp of the resulting perceptions – some of which go unrecognized, as much by the director as by those who evaluate his work. These may vary from preconceptions (or a lack of them) about the writer himself to the prevailing modes of the director's own work, or from such imponderables as the ‘lingering’ effect of objects on stage whose original function has been fulfilled to the ‘intertextuality’ always present when a play has a previous production history. The author argues not for the impossible elimination of such influences, but for their proper recognition, so that the director may be better aware of the reasons behind the choices he makes in translating a ‘reading’ into a production. Michael L. Quinn has previously published essays on Brecht and Roman Jakobson, and is currently serving as a play-reader for the San Francisco Magic Theater while preparing his doctoral dissertation on the theatre semiotics of the Prague school.

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Geografia romanului românesc (1933-1947): arealul național

Transilvania ◽

10.51391/trva.2021.09.02. ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 10-17

Author(s):

Emanuel Modoc ◽

Nicoleta Strugari ◽

Mihnea Bâlici ◽

Radu Vancu ◽

Ștefan Baghiu ◽

...

Keyword(s):

The Novel ◽

Fictional Worlds

This article analyzes the ways in which the Romanian novel published between 1933-1947 represents cities, towns, peripheries and villages in the fictional worlds. It asserts the democratization of the narrative universe through the novel of the periphery and discusses the birth of the touristic novel, in which characters often spend time in new areas for relaxation. It also challenges the idea of spatial atomization, since the geographical preferences of the authors are usually centralized and gentrified. Almost only subgenre novels and ethnical minority authors are responsible for the democratization of the national geography of the Romanian novel in 1933-1947.

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Literary Geographies in Balzac and Proust

10.1017/9781108992923 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Melanie Conroy

Keyword(s):

Physical Space ◽

The Novel ◽

Place Names ◽

Place Making ◽

Geographical Analysis ◽

The Core ◽

Central Concern ◽

Literary Geography ◽

Fictional Worlds ◽

Literary Cartography

Literary geography is one of the core aspects of the study of the novel, both in its realist and post-realist incarnations. Literary geography is not just about connecting place-names to locations on the map; literary geographers also explore how spaces interact in fictional worlds and the imaginary of physical space as seen through the lens of characters' perceptions. The tools of literary cartography and geographical analysis can be particularly useful in seeing how places relate to one another and how characters are associated with specific places. This Element explores the literary geographies of Balzac and Proust as exemplary of realist and post-realist traditions of place-making in novelistic spaces. The central concern of this Element is how literary cartography, or the mapping of place-names, can contribute to our understanding of place-making in the novel.

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