The study attempts to identify the “interliterary network” of the post-Romantic period from the perspective of “small national literatures” through an analysis of two Central European texts: ...Faustiáda (1864) by the Slovak writer Jonáš Záborský and Doktor Faust (1844) by the Czech writer Šebestián Hněvkovský. Although in the history of their respective literatures, both texts rank among the classics, they have been seen as “antiquary relicts” because of their genre hybridization, literary-orientational interference, and parallel coexistence of two different poetics within individual texts. The works belong to the genre of “Faustiads” whose purpose is to demythicize and desacralize the Faustian theme. The parodical-humorous form or didactically patriotic presentation enables them to cope with the historical philosophy of their nations. The interliterary interpretation of these works results in the transformation of fixed negative reflections in the literary discourse and in the confirmation of the diversity of the Central European post-Romantic tradition.
The paper conveys information on the current state of Czech and Slovak comparatist thought as regards its methods, thematical orientation and institutional base. Czech and Slovak comparative research ...has always been a complementary whole embracing, on the one hand, the tradition of Slavonic studies grounded in structural aesthetics (S. Wollman) and, on the other, the endeavour to develop the theory of interliterarines and interdisciplinary study of the world literature (D. Ďurišin). Much to our regret, the disruption of this “symbiosis” at the turn of 1990s resulted in losing contacts with the rest of the world. Therefore the prime objective of the newly established Czech-Slovak Association of Comparative Literature, based in the Institute for World Literature SAV, Bratislava, is to encourage Czech and Slovak literary research. The constitutive members of this association already in 2013 participated in the 20th World Congress of Comparative Literature in Paris (AILC/ICLA) so as to present the English version of their World Literature Studies journal under the title Comparative Literary Studies as Cultural Criticism. The first joint conference of Czech and Slovak comparatists (Slavica Litteraria 18, 2015, No. 1) was held in Bratislava in February 2015. For our next event, the 21st AILC Congress in Paris 2016, Czech and Slovak scholars, together with their foreign colleagues, have prepared a joint panel presentation Old and New Concepts of Comparative Literature in the Globalized World. Convinced that theoretical and methodological discourse is carried on in various languages and power stands, present-day Czech and Slovak comparative research, while following the pillar traditions of the past, espouses modern inspirations that obviously relinquish historical poetics and the theory of interliterariness, bound for exploring new cultural identities, post-colonial and area studies.
Nearly a century ago, in an opuscule entitledMomentum Catastroficum, Pío Baroja made an assertion upon which we must meditate in various ways: “If Catalonia separates from Spain, within fifty years ...it will be spiritually French” (55). Independent of his motivations, the thing that most attracts our attention in Baroja’s affirmation (which in no way can be understood simply as aboutade) is his ability to do something that Catalans have scarcely done for some time: that is, to think about our literary, intellectual, political, and editorial culture, once independence from Spain has been achieved. This issue cannot be assumed
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