VÍCEJAZYČNÁ PRÓZA V NOVÉ ČESKÉ LITERATUŘE A JEJÍ STYL
Multilingual prose in modern Czech literature and its style

Summary/Abstract: Although literary style is usually considered in the context of a single national language, one characteristic of literary texts is the possibility of utilizing linguistic means from several languages and to connect them in various ways. Usually, there is an opposition between the matrix language (the language of the community for whom the text is primarily intended) and passages formulated in other, embedded languages, which take on the role of foreign languages in relation to the matrix language. The description of the style of such texts must respect their multilingual character, i.e. it must observe the principles of selection and organization of the linguistic means both in relation to the matrix language and to the embedded language(s). The features of the style of multilingual texts are presented in this study through three examples from 20th-century Czech literature: Jaromír John’s short story collection Veèery na slamníku (Evenings on a Straw Mattress, 1920), Jan Novák’s short story collection Striptease Chicago (1983) and Jan Køesadlo’s novel La calle Neruda (1995).

• Details
• Contents