KRIZE KRIZE ANEB BOHOVÉ SVRŽENÍ Z TRŮNU TO NEMAJÍ LEHKÉ
THE CRISIS OF A CRISIS OR GODS THROWN OFF THE THRONE GET INTO TROUBLE

Summary/Abstract: The study deals with the crisis of today’s Czech literature reflected by contemporary literary community. It comes out of the fact that awareness of the crisis of the contemporary literature is in a way a temporary state and a common counterpart of the literary life. Critical argumentation of the crisis is that is to say usually led by the efforts to distance oneself from the present literary operation and to provoke its participants to a change that should bring new significant works of art. The author of the reflection is however aware of the fact that the contemporary crisis of the Czech literature has its substantial particularities. The first feature is that it is felt as heavy and long-lasting beginning already in 1989. The second feature is that it is felt as historically fundamental marginalization of literature whose center lies in the “over-production” of works and words and at the same time in the diversion of addressees from the literary culture because reading and knowledge of literature is not part of the prestige of intellectuals anymore. This is connected with the third characteristic of the crisis and that is disillusion of the men of letters from the addressees and from the post-Velvet Revolution commencement of the literature of the commercial and mass reading. The fourth and most significant characteristic of the crisis is that it is felt as permanent. Today use of the word crisis is not conceptual: the critics of the present are sure that the present state is bad but, however, they are not able to face it with a specific positive program that would become a generally accepted way out. And if there are any programmatic efforts they have usually extreme form. One of their pronounced poles is represented by the opinions of authors and especially poets who are determined to follow their artistic truth regardless the addressees. The opposite attitude is rather held by the theoreticians of the postmodern culture who consider the fact that literature got lost and in the future therefore has to take addressee into consideration and return to forms more communicative for the readers.

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