Search results for ""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 Farek 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, Farek'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 res

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This book is linguistic in nature, offering a number of aspects of contemporary languages and their proverbs. Focusing mostly on lexical, semantic and pragmatic aspects, the book also explores language corpora findings. Apart from collecting data on proverbs from dozens of languages, there is an effort to map proverbs within a language in a systematic and reliable way. The book will prove useful to paremiologists, lexicographers, and comparative linguists.

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This collection of the earliest prose by one of literature's greatest stylists captures, as scholar Arnault Mar chal put it, "the moment when Hrabal discovered the magic of writing." Taken from the period when Bohumil Hrabal shifted his focus from poetry to prose, these stories--many written in school notebooks, typed and read aloud to friends, or published in samizdat--often showcase raw experiments in style that would define his later works. Others intriguingly utilize forms the author would never pursue again. Featuring the first appearance of key figures from Hrabal's later writings, such as his real-life Uncle Pepin, who would become a character in his later fiction and is credited here as a coauthor of one piece, the book also contains stories that Hrabal would go on to cannibalize for some of his most famous novels. All together, Why I Write? offers readers the chance to explore this important nascent phase of Hrabal's writing. Expertly interpreted by award-winning Hrabal translator David Short, this collection comprises some of the last remaining prose works by Hrabal to be translated into English. A treasure trove for Hrabal devotees, Why I Write? allows us to see clearly why this great prose master was, as described by Czech writer and publisher Josef Skvoreck , "fundamentally a lyrical poet."

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Although Czech scenographer and painter Jaroslav Malina (1937-2016) lived in turbulent times, he won international respect for his work. Spanning Malina's entire life--from his early years in the Nazi protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, through four decades under communism and the period after the Velvet Revolution returned the Czech state to democracy--the essays and interviews in this volume examine the depth and breadth of his accomplishments. Essays by scholars from the Czech Republic, United Kingdom, and the United States clarify and illuminate Malina's contributions to art both in Central Europe and across the world. Exploring multiple aspects of Malina's career, they shed light on his roots in modernism, which characterized the years of the First Republic (1918-38), through the advent of postmodernism, contextualizing his accomplishments in a variety of media while adding insights about his methods and their philosophical underpinnings. Appearing in print for the first time, interview transcripts provide an intimate view of the impulses that guided Malina over the course of his career. Also featuring over one hundred and fifty color images that illustrate the connections between Malina's public scenographic work and his more personal paintings, this book reveals Malina as an artist who continued to work during difficult and changing times without ever losing a very human approach to life.

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In this collection of writings produced between 2000 and 2018, the pioneering literary historian of the Czech underground, Martin Machovec, examines the multifarious nature of the underground phenomenon. After devoting considerable attention to the circle surrounding the band The Plastic People of the Universe and their manager, the poet Ivan M. Jirous, Machovec turns outward to examine the broader concept of the underground, comparing the Czech incarnation not only with the movements of its Central and Eastern European neighbors, but also with those in the world at large. In one essay, he reflects on the so-called Půlnoc Editions, which published illegal texts in the darkest days of the late forties and early fifties. In other essays, Machovec examines the relationship between illegal texts published at home (samizdat) and those smuggled out to be published abroad (tamizdat), as well as the range of literature that can be classified as samizdat, drawing attention to movements frequently overlooked by literary critics. In his final, previously unpublished essay, Machovec examines Jirous’s “Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival” not as a merely historical document, but as literature itself.

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The Communist regimes of Europe collapsed more than a quarter century ago, and the Third Reich fell in World War II. But today's rising global tide of far-right extremism makes totalitarian regimes seem not a memory, but a possibility. In such a time, fear seems to trump hope. For any of us facing a world we no longer seem to recognize, the graphic novel We're Still at War is a powerful reminder not just of where these sweeping forces can lead, but also of the human forces that can combat them. Published in partnership with Post Bellum, a nonprofit organization devoted to documenting and sharing eyewitness accounts of the key events of twentieth-century Czech history, this book tells the stories of real people and their struggles under totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia. Bringing together thirteen of the top Czech and Slovak artists with thirteen victims and survivors of Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes, We're Still at War uses comics to open our recent, troubled past to a contemporary world. The narratives are as diverse and surprising as humanity itself, depicting victories and defeats, acts of weakness and heroism. The connecting thread, however, is clear: while the threat is real, it is more important than ever to remember the power of even the smallest moments of altruism and human kindness. Subjected to the destructive power of totalitarianism, the heroes of these stories sacrificed everything to help others. For younger generations who have no memory of European totalitarianism and for those who witnessed it on either side of the Iron Curtain, for twentieth-century history buffs, and for comic book fans, especially admirers of Art Spiegelman's Maus, We're Still at War is a beautiful and enthralling testament to human endurance.

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Always in the shadow of their more famous urban neighbors, small towns are consistently overlooked in historical research, especially in Europe. This book investigates the ramifications of that tendency for development initiatives. Paying particular attention to the marketability of towns' cultural heritage and of the diverse ways local culture has been influenced by national and regional history, an international team of urban historians, sociologists, and historians of art and architecture present case studies of towns in England, Spain, Portugal, Greece, the Czech Republic, and Russia to explore new methods for motivating development and renewal.

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This book provides an up-to-date, comprehensive, synoptic, and easy-to-grasp account of the state of public policy as a field. Both a scholar and a Czech policy maker, Martin Potůček draws on his vast and diverse experience to offer descriptions of public policy’s normative and conceptual foundations, stages, actors, and institutions, as well as fifteen of the most frequently used public policy theories. Featuring illustrative empirical case studies, this innovative guide shows how these theories can be applied to making public policy. With particular insight into the importance of cultural context and historical legacies for policy making in post-Communist Europe, Public Policy provides nuanced, expert insight into the difficulties of public policy discourse and reform.

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These new editions of the first universal textbooks for studying Czech as a foreign language employ a strictly communication-based format that requires no mediating language and thus is ideal for users of all mother tongues. Fresh and modern in their approach, these books systematically develop all language skills—reading, speaking, listening, and writing—using engaging illustrations and texts that emphasize the natural dialogical character of the language as used in everyday speech. Jitka Cvejnová’s extensive experience teaching intensive, immersive classes and introducing foreign learners to the Czech world through language also enables her to enrich the books with valuable sociocultural context. Consequently the only Czech language textbooks based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages levels, they are ideal for use in both short-term and long-term courses.Česky, prosím III is intended for young adults and adults who want to master Czech at the B1 level. It also includes a workbook, grammar overview, audio exercises on CD, and other materials online.

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Middle Eastern instability is manifest externally in many ways: by crises afflicting governing regimes, the rise of political Islam, terrorism, revolution, civil war, increased migration, and the collapse of many states. This book examines the roots of this instability using a theoretically original and empirically supported historical-sociological comparative analysis. Countering common interpretations of postcolonial Middle Eastern development, Instability in the Middle East focuses on the highly uneven and unsynchronized pace of change in individual sociodemographic, economic, and political dimensions of modernization. Drawing on the theory of multiple modernities, Cerny investigates the broader cultural, religious, and international political context of uneven modernization in the Middle East and tests his model using a time series of dozens of indicators over the past fifty years, revealing a long-term trend of cumulative change across the region.

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This is a book about collective guilt, individual fate, and repentance, a tale that explores how we can come to be responsible for crimes we neither directly commit nor have the power to prevent. Set in the Czechoslovakian borderland shortly after WWII amid the sometimes violent expulsion of the region's German population, Jaroslav Durych's poetic, deeply symbolic novel is a literary touchstone for coming to terms with the Czech Republic's difficult and taboo past of state-sanctioned violence. A leading Catholic intellectual of the early twentieth century, Durych became a literary and political throwback to the prewar Czechoslovak Republic and faced censorship under the Stalinist regime of the 1950s. As such, he was a man not unfamiliar with the ramifications of a changing society in which the minority becomes the rule-making political authority, only to end up condemned as criminals. Though Durych finished writing God's Rainbow in 1955, he could not have hoped to see it published in his lifetime. Released in a still-censored form in 1969, God's Rainbow is available here in full for the first time in English.

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Summer of Caprice, a captivating comic novel first published in 1926, is a classic of Czech literature, yet it is little known elsewhere. Commonly considered untranslatable due to the complexities of the text, which is characterized by a playful narrative and an exceptional mastery of language, and its profound cultural context, it is rendered here in English that beautifully captures Vladislav Vancura's experimental style or, as the author himself called it, his "poetism in prose." Mixing the archaic with the innovative, raw colloquialisms with biblical quotations, Summer of Caprice opens an uproarious window onto the Czech spirit, humor, and way of life.

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A time series is a sequence of numbers collected at regular intervals over a period of time. Designed with emphasis on the practical application of theoretical tools, Elements of Time Series Econometrics is an approachable guide for the econometric analysis of time series. The text is divided into five major sections. The first section, The Nature of Time Series, gives an introduction to time series analysis. The next section, Difference Equations, describes briefly the theory of difference equations, with an emphasis on results that are important for time series econometrics. The third section, Univariate Time Series, presents the methods commonly used in univariate time series analysis, the analysis of time series of a single variable. The fourth section, Multiple Time Series, deals with time series models of multiple interrelated variables. The final section, new to this edition, is Panel Data and Unit Root Tests and deals with methods known as panel unit root tests that are relevan

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The Philosophy of Living Nature focuses on the approach of the Western philosophical tradition to physis, or nature. Zdenek Kratochvíl reveals, on a philosophical level, the roots of today’s environmental crisis, presenting an etymological investigation of the concept of “nature” itself and arguing for the necessity of focusing on the world and its plurality as the background for phenomena and the context of things, as a unity of horizons, as a paradigm for understanding nature. However, as Kratochvíl makes clear, questions about the natural world have stakes far beyond the realm of philosophy: chapters in this wide-ranging and richly nuanced book deal with the identity of living organisms and the relation of life and being. Together, they provide an analysis of Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolution and question in what sense we may know living beings.

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Written between 1954 and 1957 and treating events from the Stalinist era of Czechoslovakia’s postwar Communist regime, Midway Upon the Journeyof Our Life flew in the face of the reigning aesthetic of socialist realism, an anti-heroic novel informed by the literary theory of Viktor Shklovsky and constructed from episodes and lyrical sketches of the author and his neighbors’ everyday life in industrial north Bohemia, set against a backdrop of historical and cultural upheaval. Meditative and speculative reflections here alternate and overlap with fragmentary accounts of Jedlicka’s own biography and slices of the lives of people around him, typically rendered as overheard conversations. The narrative passages range in chronology from May 1945 to the early 1950s, with sporadic leaps through time as the characters go about the business of “building a new society” and the mythology that goes with it. Due to its critical view of socialist society, Midway remained unpublished until 1966, amid the easing of cultural control, but a complete version of this darkly comic novel did not appear in Czech until 1994.

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Pavel Dias’s work forms one of the touchstones of Czech journalistic and documentary photography. Working at a time when the stiffness of form and content called for by Soviet ideology was giving way to photography capturing people and real life, Dias was one of the main representatives in the country of classical humanist photography, an approach that characterizes his work to this day. This overview of his work, containing nearly 180 documentary and art photographs, demonstrates how, despite the transformations going on around him, again and again Dias returns to his original humanistic motto: to explain humankind to itself, to see life in everything. Commentary text is presented in Czech and English, and this volume includes an interview with the author by renowned Czech journalist Karel Hvíždala.

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The volume deals with the interaction between syntax, informational structure (or functional sentence perspective), and text in present-day English and Czech. Libuse Duskova focuses on the two facets of functional sentence perspective: syntactic structures as carriers of informational structure functions and the connection of functional sentence perspective within the level of text. Functional sentence perspective is investigated as a potential factor of syntactic divergence between English and Czech, and the role of functional sentence perspective is examined with respect to theme development, text build-up, and style. Other topics include the hierarchical relationship between syntax and functional sentence perspective and general and specific questions of word order, with major attention paid to the role of semantics.

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CZ;SK

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Examining, outlining, elucidating, and supplementing the existing body of scholarship concerning the medieval theological supposition that man was created as a replacement for fallen angels, this book traces the implications of the question from the first century of the common era to the present day.

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In 1936, following the sale of Newton's unpublished manuscripts at auction, the scientific world was shocked: it turned out that Newton's writings in physics and mathematics, often considered the foundations of modern science, were only a fragment of his writings, most of which were focused on theology and alchemy. In this study of Newton's work and thought, Irena stepanova argues for a Newton who was not the man of cold reason we know, but a "priest-scientist" with the life-long intention of carrying out an examination of God himself, as he revealed himself in both the world and in scriptural writings.

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This collaborative monograph will commemorate the centenary of the Prague English Studies, officially inaugurated in 1912 by the appointment of Vilem Mathesius. Apart from reassessing the work of major representatives, such as Mathesius, Vladislav Vancura, and others, and reviewing important developments in literature-oriented Prague English studies with respect to Prague structuralism, "Prague English Studies and the Transformation of Philologies" will focus on the methodological problems of the discipline related to the transformation of humanistic and modern philologies, searching for the links between two historically distinct interdisciplinary projects: humanist philology and structuralist semiology.

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These new editions of the first universal textbooks for studying Czech as a foreign language employ a strictly communication-based format that requires no mediating language and thus is ideal for users of all mother tongues. Fresh and modern in their approach, these books systematically develop all language skills—reading, speaking, listening, and writing—using engaging illustrations and texts that emphasize the natural dialogical character of the language as used in everyday speech. Jitka Cvejnová’s extensive experience teaching intensive, immersive classes and introducing foreign learners to the Czech world through language also enables her to enrich the books with valuable sociocultural context. Consequently the only Czech language textbooks based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages levels, they are ideal for use in both short-term and long-term courses.Česky, prosím II, which meets to requirements for level A2, continues to derive grammar rules directly from presented texts. Also introducing life and culture in the Czech Republic, it consists of a textbook with grammar overview, a workbook, and two audio CDs.

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A favorite work of Czech humor, We Were a Handful depicts the adventures of five boys from a small Czech town through the diary of Petr Bajza, the grocer's son. Written by Karel Polacek at the height of World War II before his deportation to Auschwitz in 1944, this book draws on the happier years of Polacek's own childhood as inspiration. As we look upon the world through Petr's eyes, we, too, marvel at the incomprehensible world of grownups; join in fights between gangs of neighborhood kids; and laugh at the charming language of boys, a major source of the book's humor. This translation at last offers English-language readers the opportunity to share in Petr's (and Polacek's) childhood and reminds us that joy and laughter are possible even in the darkest times.

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Since the collapse of the iron curtain, Prague has become one of Europe's - and the world's - most popular tourist destinations. As in London, Paris, and Rome, visitors flock to the gorgeous buildings and monuments that grace the streets of Prague, entranced by structures ranging from Gothic and baroque to neoclassical and cubist. And while hundreds of thousands stroll over the Charles Bridge and gaze up at the St. Vitus Cathedral each year, far fewer venture away from the crowds to seek out the countless gems of art nouveau peppered throughout Prague. With "Art-Nouveau Prague", Petr Wittlich - one of Europe's leading experts on nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture - tours those monuments and buildings of Prague representative of the art nouveau movement and offers insightful commentary on each. Along the way, Wittlich visits such sites as the Municipal House, the Wilson Railway Station, the Grand Hotel Europa, and works by sculptors Frantisek Bilek, Ladislav Saloun, and Stanislav Sucharda. An introductory essay by Wittlich emphasizing the role of art nouveau within contemporary currents of modern European art accompanies one hundred color illustrations of some of the most stunning examples of art nouveau architecture and decoration, while a detailed bibliography provides additional reading for each of the sites displayed in the book. "Art-Nouveau Prague" is a must-have for those traveling to Prague for the first time or for anyone who appreciates or wants to learn more about art nouveau style.

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On its initial publication in Czech in 1942, "Saturnin" was a best-seller, its gentle satire offering an unexpected - if temporary - reprieve from the grim reality of the German occupation. In the years since, the novel has been hailed as a classic of Czech literature, and this translation makes it available to English-language readers for the first time-which is entirely appropriate, for author Zdenek Jirotka clearly modeled his light comedy on the English masters Jerome K. Jerome and P. G. Wodehouse. The novel's main character, Saturnin, a 'gentleman's gentleman' who obviously owes a debt to Wodehouse's beloved Jeeves, wages a constant battle to protect his master from romantic disaster and intrusive relatives, such as Aunt Catherine, the 'Prancing Dictionary of Slavic Proverbs'. Enlivened with new, full-color illustrations by Czech graphic artist Adolph Born, "Saturnin" will warm the heart of any fan of literary comedy.

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Josef Šafařík’s Seven Letters to Melin is an exploration of man’s alienation from nature—and from himself—in the modern technological age. Conceived as a series of letters to Melin, an engineer who believes in the value of science and technical progress, the book grows skeptical of such endeavors, while also examining mankind’s search for meaning in life. To help uncover this meaning, Šafařík posits a dichotomy between spectator and participant. The role of participant is played by Robert, an artist who has committed suicide. The spectator, embodied by the scientist Melin, views the world from a distance and searches for explanations, while the artist-participant creates the world through his own active engagement. Through these exchanges, Šafařík argues for the primacy of artistic creativity over scientific explanation, of truth over accuracy, of internal moral agency over an externally imposed social morality, and of personal religious belief over organized church-going. Šafařík is neither anti-scientific nor anti-rational; however, he argues that science has limited power, and he rejects the idea of science that denies meaning and value to what cannot be measured or calculated. Šafařík’s critiques of technology, the wage economy, and increased professionalization make him an important precursor to the philosophy of deep ecology. This book was also a major influence on the Czech president Václav Havel; in this new translation it will find a fresh cohort of readers interested in what makes us human.

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A history of the lost art of the Bohemian Ore Mountains. The development of mining towns in the Ore Mountain region of Bohemia during the thirteenth to the sixteenth century was driven by the Saxon nobility who brought with them the culture of their homeland. The art and architecture of the Ore Mountains, financed by wealthy miners and local nobility, therefore followed a different path than Prague yet rivaled its importance and grandeur.The Mining Towns of the Bohemian Ore Mountains introduces the most important mining centers and historical monuments, exploring what made the late Gothic and early Renaissance periods in northwest Bohemia so distinct from the rest of the kingdom. It also examines the specific cultural space that formed, where locals viewed the Bohemian-Saxon border as an abstract political concept that had little to do with day-to-day reality. The authors trace the monuments and works of art until the second half of the twentieth century when many of them tragically vanished because of lignite mining.

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A case study of the unusual liberties taken by the fifteenth-century Bohemian scribe Crux of Telcz.​Passionate Copying in Late Medieval Bohemia addresses a unique case in the culture of manuscript transcription and textual transmission during the late fifteenth century, a transformative period in book history. This period is marked by the widespread intrusion of an unprecedented number of scribal paratexts—tables of contents, indices, explanatory notes, etc.—into transcribed manuscripts. To explore this development, the authors dig deep into a detailed case study of the Bohemian scribe Crux of Telč (1434–1504). Unlike most medieval copyists, who were stringent in their work even when inserting paratexts, Crux of Telč is notable for the extreme liberties he took with manuscript contents. Sometimes diligent, sometimes careless, his copies are notably rife with his own inventions and additions to the text. Crux’s life story is meticulously reconstructed in this book, relying on his colophons—the personal annotations left by medieval copyists to identify themselves and their circumstances—and other personal notes. The singularity of his approach to manuscripts is reinforced by the authors’ inclusion of a study of another late medieval scribe, Johannes Sintram of Würtzburg (d. 1450), whose scrivening is compared with that of Crux of Telč.

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Novelist Bohumil Hrabal was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and he spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by the time of his death he was ranked with Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek, and Milan Kundera as among the nation's greatest twentieth-century writers. Hrabal's fiction blends tragedy with humor and explores the anguish of intellectuals and ordinary people alike from a slightly surreal perspective. His work ranges from novels and poems to film scripts and essays. Rambling On is a collection of stories set in Hrabal's Kersko. Several of the stories were written before the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague but had to be reworked when they were rejected by Communist censorship during the 1970s. This edition features the original, uncensored versions of those stories.

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A lavishly illustrated exploration of forward-looking Czech art around the turn of the twentieth century. Though it’s less widely heralded than Berlin and Vienna, 1890s Prague was every bit as much a fin-de-siècle cultural center as its Mittel European peers. At the end of the nineteenth century, the city found itself home to a fervent coterie of young visual artists all deliberately pushing against—indeed, seeking to secede from—the traditional artistic structures of the day. ​ This book traces Czech Secessionist art from the turn of the twentieth century by following its three main stylistic schools: naturalistic-impressionistic, symbolist, and ornamental-decorative. Though these styles developed separately, their symbiotic relationship gives the art a deeper significance and disrupts the traditional understanding of Art Nouveau and Secessionist art as an eclectic decorative style that faded away at the beginning of the twentieth century. Illustrated with more than three hundred color plates, Czech Secession is a fittingly lush tribute to one city’s underappreciated and forward-looking artistic blossoming.

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Spanning his entire career, this selection of texts by influential philosopher Jan Patočka illustrates his thoughts on the appropriate manner of being and engagement in the world. The writings assembled in Living in Problematicity examine the role of the philosopher in the world, how the world constrains us through ideology, and how freedom is possible through the recognition of our human condition in the problems of the world. These views outline Patočka’s political philosophy and how his later engagement in the political sphere with the human rights initiative Charter 77 corresponds with the ideas he maintained throughout his life. This short and engaging book—published in conjunction with the prestigious philosophy press OIKOYMENH—is an ideal English-language introduction to the most significant Czech philosopher in recent history.

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By examining the myriad myths surrounding Central European universities, Czech historians Lukáš Fasora and Jiří Hanuš take a diachronic approach to investigating the issues facing higher learning in the region. Using careful historical research, the authors point out vast discontinuities, comparing how the philosophy of education from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century has changed and how this evolution relates to the current administrative goals of higher education. As they confront the history and myths of university education, the authors do not shy away from exploring difficult questions, such as whether political and economic influences have completely transformed the goals and structure of today’s universities in Central Europe. Though focused on university systems in a specific geographic region, the findings have wide-ranging implications for higher education the world over.

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Syntax-Semantics Interface is a collection of papers written by leading Czech linguist Eva Hajičová between 1973 and 2014 that draw on the theoretical framework of the functional generative description proposed by Petr Sgall in the early 1960s and developed since. The book reflects Hajičová’s research contributions to four main domains: the specification of underlying (deep) sentence structure (analyzed in terms of dependency relations); the information structure of the sentence (topic-focus articulation) and its relation to the specification of presupposition and negation and to other related phenomena; the building of a scheme for an annotated corpus of Czech to serve, among other things, in the verification of theoretical linguistic claims; and some fundamental aspects of discourse structure, namely the concept of the hierarchy of elements in the stock of knowledge shared by speaker and hearer. Through new introductory statements, Hajičová also compares her original findings with current state-of-the-art of linguistic theory at home and abroad.

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A vision of late-twentieth-century Prague from an acclaimed Czech novelist. In late 1992, three years after the Velvet Revolution and as Czechoslovakia is about to dissolve into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, choreographer and dancer Leonora Marty, who fled the Communist state decades earlier, has returned to Prague. Having wrapped up her ballet of The Makropulos Affair, the famous dancer meets old classmates, wanders the city through crowds of tourists, and visits the most obscure and unvisited museums. When she is approached by Thomas Asperger, a descendant of ethnic Germans driven from Czechoslovakia after World War II, she must confront three relationships—her relationship with the city of her youth, her homeland’s relationship with its past, and her new romance with this German admirer. Written in German and published in 1995, by an author whose life mirrored her protagonist’s, the novel provides a cultural tour of Prague. Employing a style as influenced by the operas of Leoš Janácek as the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Transfigured Night is a masterpiece of Czech literature, showing that the culture of this nation comes in a variety of tongues.

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A haunting novel of post-Soviet Slovakia, centering on an enigmatic one-sided conversation. “So, as you see, I am familiar with the case. However, we can’t discuss it unless you learn more about some other court cases, so that you can compare your father’s trial with other, more baffling cases, and see it in the context of the madness that reigned at the time.” Ján Johanides’ riveting Slovak novel immediately thrusts you into the midst of a bewildering second-person dialogue, bestowing the reader with the role of a silent partner in a one-sided conversation with a mysterious archivist. As the story unfurls piece by piece, it becomes clear that the archivist, who can’t seem to stay on topic, has both a tragic history and the key to unlocking your family’s darkest secret, a secret that may or may not involve the Czechoslovak secret police, American and Soviet intelligence, Israeli politics, and a tire full of dollars. ​ Set after the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, But Crimes Do Punish is awash with paranoia, revealing how the madness of the Communist era continues to bleed into the instability of the present. Written in 1995, this haunting novel—the first work of Slovak fiction published by Karolinum Press—evokes the spirit of John le Carré and the style of Carlos Fuentes while illuminating issues that still plague post-Communist Europe.

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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.

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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.

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In Degrees of Separation, scholars from the Czech Republic, Canada, Germany, and Hungary take a new approach to exploring the work of one of Central Europe’s most interesting modernist painters, Bohumil Kubišta. While many art historians have viewed Kubišta’s work solely in the context of an idealized Czech canon, Kubišta did not identify with a nation-state clearly defined by ethnicity, language, or territorial reach. Taking a transnational approach that incorporates thorough topographical research, the authors attempt to redraw the map of European modernism by exploring the artist’s subversive approach to the stylistic currents of his time. The book reveals the complex relationships within early twentieth-century Europe, as Kubišta and other Central European artists tried to balance their admiration for the dominant artistic trends coming out of Paris with their desire to find alternative forms of expression arising from local artistic and intellectual sources. The richly illustrated book features a wealth of documentation, including an exhaustive timeline with notes, a comprehensive inventory of Kubišta’s works, and an up-to-date exhibition list.

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In this comparative tour de force, Josef Hrdlička--one of the Czech Republic’s foremost experts on lyric poetry--examines the impact of exile, literal or spiritual, on poetry. Hrdlička argues that exile serves to disrupt the fundamental elements of poetry, especially its linguistic and cultural framework. Beginning with an examination of exile as a cultural phenomenon in the Western tradition, Hrdlička follows its complex history and treatment by poets from Solon to Celan. Focusing on the specific poetics of exile, he identifies Ovid’s elegies as an early model of exile in poetics before tracing the metamorphosis of exile as a concept through the modern age and the very Baudelarian idea that a person can be metaphorically exiled by the act of daily living itself. The core of Poetry in Exile, however, hews closer to Hrdlička’s homeland, homing in on the postwar poetry of Czech exiles. Poets such as Ivan Blatný, Milada Součková, Ivan Diviš, and Petr Král are investigated as examples to test the theoretical questions raised in the first part of the book and discover the answers that their individual poems provide.

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Prague has been a center of university education for centuries, and in this book, Josef Petráň and Lydia Petráňová guide us through the history and architecture of Prague’s diverse universities, enlightening us about academic life and the integral role played by the universities in the social and cultural life of the Czech capital city. Prague’s rise as the ultimate university town began on April 7, 1348, when Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, founded the first institution of higher education north of the Alps and east of the Rhine. During the second half of the sixteenth century, Charles University faced competition with the opening of the Jesuit Academy at Klementinum—until the two institutions merged in 1654. In 1718 the world’s first civil engineering school, which later became Czech Technical University, opened. At the very end of the nineteenth century, the foundations of the Academy of Fine Arts were laid in Prague, and later it was supplemented by the University of Decorative Arts. In the decades following World War II a growth of interest in higher education raised the number of universities in Prague to a total of nine.Prague: University Town explores all of them. Illustrated in color throughout with images that span from the gothic arches of Charles University to the technicist and brutalist structures of the Czech Technical University, this book is both a celebration of universities’ architectural beauty and a thorough history of higher education in the home of Central Europe’s oldest university.

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Most, one of the most impressive historical cities of Northern Bohemia, was destroyed in the sixties and seventies for coal mining. When plans to redevelop the city began, hope and expectations ran high; in the end, however, Most became a symbol for the heartless incompetence of Czechoslovak communism. In this book, Matěj Spurný explores the historical city of Most from the nineteenth century into the years following World War II, investigating the decision to destroy it as well as the negotiations concerning the spirit of the proposed new city. Situating postwar Most in the context of cultural and social shifts in Czechoslovakia and Europe as a whole, Spurný traces the path a medieval city took to become a showcase of brutalist architecture and the regime’s technicist inhumanity. But the book, like the city of Most itself, does not end in tragedy. Fusing architectural and political history with urban and environmental studies, Spurný’s tale shows the progress that can be made when Czechs confront the crimes of the past—including the expulsion of local Germans and the treatment of the Romani minority—and engage with rational, contemporary European concepts of urban renewal.

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In this book, Miloš Pojar traces the development and transformation of the opinions about Jews and Judaism of the first Czechoslovak president, T. G. Masaryk. Pojar describes the key events and ideas that shaped Masaryk’s attitudes: his first contacts with the Jewish world as a child, and later as a student; his work as a philosopher and sociologist, through which his thinking on Marxism, social issues, Christianity, and Judaism evolved; and his later, pivotal, experience at the time of the anti-Semitic libel trials against Leopold Hilsner, known as the Hilsner Affair. Pojar also details the period when Masaryk, as president, formulated his position on matters such as the Czech-Jewish movement, the question of assimilation, and Zionism. Featuring an entire chapter on Masaryk’s celebrated 1927 trip to Palestine as well as a series of brief profiles of outstanding Jewish figures that explore both Masaryk’s attitudes to their ideas and their opinions of Masaryk, this book is a compelling personal portrait and a substantial contribution to our understanding of the history of Jews in the Czech lands.

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At the end of the fifteenth century, when the Jagiellons and first Habsburg rulers sat on Prague’s throne, the character of the city’s municipalities began to transition from medieval to Renaissance. In Renaissance Prague, historian Eliška Fučíková paints a vivid picture of the Bohemian capital during this time of sweeping change. As Fučíková reveals, this period saw the evolution of new architectural motifs across the city. In particular, there was a distinct transformation of Prague Castle, including the construction of well-known features such as the Ball Game Hall and Queen Anne’s Summer Palace. Featuring a concise historical overview and a guide to prominent figures of the time, as well as a variety of illustrations—from artwork to archival images, contemporary photographs, and maps—Fučíková’s book is a beautiful, enlightening tour through the Renaissance metropolis of the Bohemian Kingdom.

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The Atlas of Religions in Czechia represents the first comprehensive geographical analysis of the religious landscape of Czechia and its transformation since the fall of communism in 1989. The atlas is divided into three parts. The first section tackles regional differentiation between select religious movements and groups within the last two decades; the second focuses on sacred objects in their environment and their deployment in ten model regions across Czechia; and the final part analyzes the relational context of specific spatial, socioeconomic, and demographic factors connected to religiosity in contemporary Czech society. Every chapter includes a cartographic section that explains these phenomena in their regional context, thereby illustrating the diversity, development, historical continuity, and global influences of Czech religiosity.

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Crossing Between Tradition and Modernity presents thirteen essays written in honor of Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova (1932-2012), a member of the Prague School of Sinology and an important scholar of Chinese literature who was at the forefront in introducing literary theory into sinology. Dolezelova-Velingerova was that rare scholar who wrote with equal knowledge and skill about both modern and premodern Chinese literature. The essays emulate Dolezelova-Velingerova's scholarship in terms of treating a broad range of historical periods, literary genres, and topics from Tang travel essays to cultural identity in postcolonial Hong Kong. Organized into two parts, "Language, Structure, and Genre," and "Identities and Self-Representations," the essays are motivated by an abiding concern with issues of language, narrative structure, and the complex nature of literary meaning that were at the heart of Dolezelova-Velingerova's work.

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Springtide A chaffinch in a tree of cherry sings merrily spring's introit. Its blazing bobble dwells in leaves, alive, and swells in scarlet. The flowers are flares of white. The chaffinch has gone quiet and turned sky-gazer. My eyes close on the day: an orb revolves in grey and red and azure. Poet and artist Bohuslav Reynek spent most of his life in the relative obscurity of the Czech-Moravian Highlands; although he suffered at the hands of the Communist regime, he cannot be numbered among the dissident poets of Eastern Europe who won acclaim for their political poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather, Reynek belongs to an older pastoral-devotional tradition a kindred spirit to the likes of English-language poets Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Robert Frost, and Edward Thomas. The first book of Reynek's poetry to be published in English, The Well at Morning presents a selection of poems from across his life and is illustrated with twenty-five of his own color etchings. Also featuring three essays by leading scholars that place Reynek's life and work alongside those of his better-known peers, this book presents a noted Czech artist to the wider world, reshaping and amplifying our understanding of modern European poetry.

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For The Pied Piper, Czech writer Viktor Dyk found his muse in the much retold medieval Saxon legend of the villainous, pipe-playing rat-catcher. Dyk uses the tale as a loose frame for his story of a mysterious wanderer, outcast, and would-be revolutionary--a dreamer typical of fin de siecle Czech literature who serves Dyk as a timely expression of the conflict between the petty concerns of bourgeois nineteenth-century society and the coming artistic generation. Impeccably rendered into English by Mark Corner, The Pied Piper retains the beautiful style of Dyk's original Czech. The inspiration for several theater and film adaptations, including a noted animated work from critically acclaimed director Jiri Barta, Dyk's classical novella is given new life by Corner's translation, proving that the piper is open to new interpretations still.

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More than a century after the publication of Czech politician Tomascaron; Garrigue Masaryk's study The Czech Question, Czech politics instead of the nation's historical struggle for survival and independence has become a pragmatic question of democratic constitutionalism and civility. Originally published in major Czech newspapers, these essays on contemporary European politics demonstrate that this new understanding involves both technical questions of power making and critical questions of its meaning. Democracy, Priban shows, is the process of permanent self-correction. It possesses both the capacity to respond to unexpected problems and crises and intrinsic tensions between principled arguments and everyday administrative processes. Defending constitutionalism, therefore, draws on principles of civil rights and freedoms, limited government, and representative democracy, the validity and persuasive force of which are at stake not only in the Czech Republic, but also in the post-national European Union and our global society at large.

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