Bøker utgitt av Karolinum,Nakladatelstvi Univerzity Karlovy,Czech Republic

A re-examination of Western interpretations-and distortions-of Indian religious traditions. In India in the Eyes of Europeans, Martin Fárek argues that when Western scholars interpret Indian traditions, they actually present distorted reflections of their own European culture, despite their attempts at unbiased objectivity. This distortion is clearest in the way India is viewed primarily through a religious lens-a lens fashioned from an implicitly Christian design. While discussing the current international dialogue on the topic and the work of such scholars as S. N. Balagangadhara, Fárek's study presents the results of original research on several key topics: the problems in assigning religious significance to the Indian traditions that gave rise to Hinduism and Buddhism; Europeans' questioning of Indians' historical consciousness; the current debate surrounding the arrival of the Aryans in India; and controversial interpretations of the work of the reformer Rammohan Raj. The result is a provocative study that should prove fascinating to Indologists, theologians, anthropologists, and anyone interested in the history of thought.

The book presents to the reader the first ever English translation of short stories, so far for no reason rather neglected, by Czech female authors at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. These short stories are brought together not only by the translator, but also by the period they were written in, as well as by the beginnings of female emancipation in the early 20th century. The book is accompanied by the biographies of all the eight authors, including B. Benesová, R. Jesenská, M. Majerová and others.

A close read of the rich collections of texts left behind by Václav Havel, one of the most important Czech thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century. No one in Czech politics or culture could match the international stature of Václav Havel at the time of his death in 2011. In the years since his passing, his legacy has only grown, as developments in the Czech Republic and elsewhere around the world continue to show the importance of his work and writing against a range of political and social ills, from autocratic brutality to messianic populism. This book looks squarely at the heart of Havel's legacy: the rich corpus of texts he left behind. It analyzes the meanings of key concepts in Havel's core vocabulary: truth, power, civilsociety, home, appeal, indifference, hotspot, theatre, prison, and responsibility. Where do these concepts appear in Havel's oeuvre? What part do they play in his larger intellectual project? How might we understand Havel's focus on these concepts as a centerpiece of his contribution to contemporary thought? How does Havel's particular perspective on the meaning of these concepts speak to us in the here and now? The ten contributors use a variety of methodological tools to examine the meaning of these concepts, drawing on a diversity of disciplines: political science and political philosophy, historical and cultural analysis, discourse/textual analysis, and linguistic-corpus analysis.

A collection of nineteenth-century folklore-infused tales of Jewish life in Prague. Trained in philosophy and medicine, the writer, translator, scholar, and political and cultural activist Siegfried Kapper (1821-1879) devoted significant effort to the advancement of Jewish culture in Bohemia, Jewish emancipation, and to the commitment of Jews to contemporary Czech society. The three stories in this collection, which first appeared in the press in the 1840s and were posthumously published as a collection at the end of the century, offer a Romantic and folkloric vision of Jewish culture in Prague. The first story, "Genenda," displays Kapper's operatic eye for detail and drama with its account of a dutiful rabbi's daughter being swept away by a dashing young man, a Christian nobleman disguised as a Jew. "The Curious Guest" is an intricate tale of a quest for wisdom and power. The final story, "Glowing Coals," is a supernatural tale of romantic desire and revenge, displaying Kapper's skill at deploying the tropes of folklore for dramatic literary effect. The collection not only provides a colorful snapshot of nineteenth-century Czech-Jewish culture but also resonates with universal human themes that transcend a single national experience.

An exploration of the place of material objects in modern poetry. In this volume, fifteen scholars and poets, from Austria, Britain, Czechia, France, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania, and Russia, explore the topic of things and objects in poetry written in a number of different languages and in different eras. The book begins with ancient poetry, then moves on to demonstrate the significance of objects in the Chinese poetic tradition. From there, the focus shifts to things and objects in the poetry of the twentieth and the twenty-first century, examining the work of Czech, Polish, and Russian poets alongside other key figures such as Rilke, Francis Ponge, William Carlos Williams, and Paul Muldoon. Along the way, the reader gets an introduction to key terms and phrases that have been associated with things in the course of poetic history, such as ekphrasis, objective lyricism. and hyperobjects.

The first collection of poetry in English by an acclaimed twentieth-century Czech writer. From the eighth floor of a tower block in Central Europe, Jan Zábrana surveyed the twentieth century. He had been exiled from his own life by Communism. His parents were imprisoned, their health was broken, and he was not allowed to study languages in college. Refusing both to rebel outright or to cave in, he thought of himself as a dead man walking. "To all those who keep asking me to do things for them, I sometimes feel like saying: 'But I'm dead. I died long ago. Why do you keep treating me as if I were one of the living?'" ​ Yet during some of Europe's most difficult years, he wrote The Lesser Histories, a collection of sixty-four sonnets that range through themes of age, sex, and political repression-a radiant testament to his times. The lines are emptied both of personal pathos and political stridency. Often Zábrana's own voice segues into those of poets he had translated over the years, leaving only a bare shimmer of subjectivity-humorous, oblique, pained-with which to view his own works and days. The poems document a splendid and bitter isolation, and are immersed in the humor, hatreds, and loves of the everyday. Published in Czech in the ill-fated year of 1968, they subsequently fell into neglect. After the fall of Communism in 1989, Zábrana's collected poems and selected diaries were published in Czech, and he was acclaimed as a major twentieth-century writer. Now, with this collection, he can begin to reach English-language readers for the first time.

A clever investigation into two unsolved mysteries of poetic authorship.   The technique known as contemporary stylometry uses different methods, including machine learning, to discover a poem‿s author based on features like the frequencies of words and character n-grams. However, there is one potential textual fingerprint stylometry tends to ignore: versification, or the very making of language into verse. Using poetic texts in three different languages (Czech, German, and Spanish), Petr PlecháÄ? asks whether versification features like rhythm patterns and types of rhyme can help determine authorship. He then tests his findings on two unsolved literary mysteries. In the first, PlecháÄ? distinguishes the parts of the Elizabethan verse play The Two Noble Kinsmen written by William Shakespeare from those written by his coauthor, John Fletcher. In the second, he seeks to solve a case of suspected forgery: how authentic was a group of poems first published as the work of the nineteenth-century Russian author Gavriil Stepanovich Batenkov? This book of poetic investigation should appeal to literary sleuths the world over.   Â

An analysis of metaphor in the legal texts of the Old Testament using the tools of cognitive and cultural linguistics. The Old Testament is rich in metaphor. Metaphorical expressions appear not only in places where you might expect them, like the poetic verses, but also in the legal texts. They appear in the preambles to collections of laws, in their final summaries, in general considerations on compliance with and violation of the law, in texts concerning the meaning of the law, and those dealing with topics now reserved for legal theory and legal philosophy. These metaphorical expressions reveal how the authors of the relevant Torah/Law texts understood their function in society and what the society of the time preferred in the law. ​ Anchored in cognitive and cultural linguistics, The Torah/Law Is a Journey investigates Hebrew metaphorical expressions concerning the key Old Testament concept of Torah/Law. Ivana Procházková identifies Hebrew conceptual metaphors and explicates the metaphorical expressions. She also uses cognitive linguistic analysis to look at modern translations of selected metaphorical expressions into Czech and English. Procházková closes with an analysis of the metaphors used in the Council of Europe publication Compass: Manual for Human Rights Education with Young People to conceptualize human rights.

An examination of representations of human migration in three centuries of Northern European literature. Migration is a frequent topic of many debates nowadays, whether it concerns refugees from war-torn areas or the economic pros and cons of the mobility of multinational corporations and their employees. Yet such migration has always been a part of the human experience, and its dimensions--with its shifting nature, manifestations, and consequences--were often greater than we can imagine today. In this book, ten scholars from Czechia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Sweden focus on how migration has manifested itself in literature and culture through the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Examining the theme of migration as it relates to questions of identity, both national and individual, the authors argue that migration almost always leads to a disturbance of identity and creates a potential for conflicts between individuals and larger groups. The book digs deep into such cases of disturbance, disruption, and hybridization of identity as they are represented in three centuries of literary works from the European North.

From his panoramic views of Prague to his enigmatic still lifes, photographer Josef Sudek (1896-1976) captured the unique spirit of the Czech capital during a wide swath of the twentieth century. Sudek enjoyed worldwide fame during his lifetime, yet a substantial part of his practice--photographing works of art--has remained largely unexplored. This book shines a light on Sudek's most beloved pictorial subject, sculpture, which acted as a bridge between his fine art photography and his commercial work. Sumptuous full-page reproductions of Sud'ks black-and-white photographs illustrate a series of thematic essays, focusing on the scope and legacy of his work, while cameos from the key people and institutions who supported his career reveal Sudek's rich connection to the artistic circles and movements of his day. Together, they uncover the shifting tension between the ability of photographs to bring art closer to the people and their potential as works of art in their own right.

A groundbreaking analysis of Alfred North Whitehead's thinking on aesthetics.

The first publication of a charming fieldwork memoir by a giant of legal anthropology.

A collection of short stories by Czech women from the turn of the twentieth century.

A richly illustrated reconsideration of the life and work of painter Bohumil Kubista.

The first English-language translation of a classic Czech antiwar novel written in the wake of WWI.

This comparative tour de force examines the impact of exile, literal or spiritual, on poetry.

This book focuses on the typological differences among the four most widely spoken Romance languages--French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish--and Czech.

So many lives were cut short by the Holocaust, many with no trace to leave behind for future generations to remember. Vendulka tells the story of a single scrap of remembrance-a candid photograph taken in the midst of this unspeakable tragedy-and that artifact's amazing aftermath. Famed Czech photographer Jan Lukas snapped an offhand portrait of twelve-year-old Vendulka Vogl in March 1943. A friend of the Vogls, Lukas was saying goodbye to the family, who were soon to leave Prague for a concentration camp. The photograph almost didn't see the light of day-Lukas knew that if the Nazis found it on him, he could wind up in the camps as well-but the image was eventually developed and came to symbolize the Holocaust and humanize its victims. Seventy years after this famous picture was taken, investigative journalist Ondřej Kundra discovered that, despite all odds, Vendulka Vogl had survived the camps of Terezín, Auschwitz, and Christianstadt, and was in fact still alive and living in the United States. Kundra persuaded her to tell the remarkable story surrounding the photograph: her survival, her later decision to flee the Communist regime for America, and how she later reconnected with Jan Lukas, maintaining a lifelong friendship. ​ Vogl's thrillingly moving story, Kundra's sharp and engaging writing, and Lukas's striking photography all combine to make Vendulka an inspiring investigation into the horrors of totalitarianism and the redemptive beauty of friendship.

Presents a series of short stories based on the author's experiences as a Red Commissar in the Russian Civil War and his return to Czechoslovakia. This title focuses on the Russian town of Bugulma and takes aim, with mordant wit, at the absurdities of a revolution.

"Smoke from nearby factories shrouds a countryside as flat as a table, a countryside stretching off to infinity. Covering it are the ashes of millions of dead. Scattered throughout are fine pieces of bone that ovens were not able to burn. When the wind comes, ashes rise to the heavens, bone fragments remain on the ground. And rain falls on the ashes, and rain turns them to good fertile soil, as befits the ashes of martyrs. And who can find the ashes of those from my native land, of whom there were 77,297? I gather some ashes with my hand, for only a hand can touch them, and I pour them into a linen sack, just as those who once left for a foreign country would gather their native soil so as never to forget, so as always to return to it." ​ So begins Jiří Weil's unforgettable prose poem, Lamentation for 77, 297 Victims, his literary monument to the Czech Jews killed during the Holocaust. A Czech-Jewish writer who worked at Prague's Jewish Museum both during and after the Nazi Occupation-he survived the Holocaust by faking his own death and hiding out until the war had ended-Weil wrote Lamentation while he served as the museum's senior librarian in the 1950s. This remarkable literary experiment presents a number of innovative approaches to writing about a horror many would deem indescribable, combining a narrative account of the Shoah with newspaper-style reportage on a handful of the lives ended by the Holocaust and quotes from the Hebrew Bible to create a specific and powerful portrait of loss and remembrance. Translated by David Lightfoot, Lamentation for 77,297 Victims is a startling and singular introduction to a writer whose works have been acclaimed by Philip Roth, Michiko Kakutani, and Siri Hustvedt.

In this book-length study, Ewa Szary-Matywiecka examines Maria Wirtemberska's Malvina, or the Heart's Intuition, an international success upon its publication in 1816 that is now widely considered to be Poland's first psychological novel. Applying structuralist methods, Szary-Matywiecka situates Wirtemberska among other literary luminaries of her day, including Rousseau and Goethe, and explores how the nineteenth-century salon culture formed the concerns and themes of her novel. Malvina's obsession with language games recall the vocabulary quizzes and semantic puzzles popular in the European salons frequented by Wirtemberska. Szary-Matywiecka also argues that the novel's motif of twins and twinned characters emerges from both the theatrical preoccupations of salons, as well as how Wirtemberska seemingly splits her voice between traditional narration and a more intrusive authorial style, helping shape her novel's innovative narrative method. Malvina, or Spoken Word in the Novel is an insightful deconstruction of a female-penned classic of European literature.