Set in postwar Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Stalinist purges of World War II, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is “a novel in the form of variations” that explores how totalitarianism affects individual and collective, national and personal,… Read More ›
The Czech writer Milan Kundera in his collection of critical essays The Art of the Novel (1988) offers a definition of the novel as “a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters,” while providing “my personal… Read More ›
None of Milan Kundera’s novels fits into the traditional concept of the novel. Each is an experimental foray into the unknown, although well prepared and supported by the literary legacy of Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Capek, and Vancura. This is particularly… Read More ›
From the ancient belief in humors to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ psychoanalytic and pharmacological methodologies, diverse theories about the mind have affected the literary production of novelists. Categorization according to these theories is difficult, because authors tend to mix… Read More ›
After a few minutes of reading stories that are not selfreflexive, readers sometimes forget what they are doing and feel transported into the world of the book. Considering this experience naïve, authors of self-reflexive fictions thwart it by such devices… Read More ›
You must be logged in to post a comment.