Publication details
Dílo Františka Kautmana jako metodologické přemostění.
| Title in English | František Kautman’s Work as a Methodological Bridging |
|---|---|
| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The author of the present contribution deals with the critical and literary work of František Kautman, a Czech writer and a literary scholar of a complicated life history which he regards as a specific “bridging” in Czech philosophical and literary thought. Though Kautman analysed the works of various writers, among others those of S. K. Neumann, F. M. Dostoevsky, T. G. Masaryk, F. Kafka, J. Patočka, and E. Hostovský, the author chose his two books on literary methodology and criticism and on topical literature called On the Typology of Literary Criticism and On Literature and Its Creators: the former focused on the problems of Russian criticism, the latter dealt with Czech literature (the volume contains the essays and reflections going back to the period of 1977-1989). Out of his artistic creations the author analysed his Novel for You, though he was the author of several other significant and marvellous prose works, e. g. a collection of poems A Drunken Satellite (1966) and that of short stories The Splendour of Balance (1969) and the novels How We Were Looking for Freedom with Jack, (1981, 1995), A Dead Arm (1977, 1992) and A Prologue to the Novel (1993). In his critical and theoretical works Kautman anticipated the fatal contrast between “hard” and “soft” methodological approaches, implicitly revealing the Russian trace or link in Czech critical thought, in his belles lettres he made experiments with the genre of the novel (following his Russian predeccesor N. G. Chernyshevsky), anticipated postmodernist narrative strategies, ambivalence, and uncertainty and, at the same time, he applied traditional European humanism and anti-fundamentalism. |