Slovenská literatúra

4

Authors: Agnieszka Janiec-Nyitrai

Tibor Žilka – Anna Zelenková – Krisztián Benyovszky: Stereotypes and Myths. Intertextuality in Central European Imagological Reflection

14

Authors: Kateřina Piorecká

The idea of the woman writer in the Czech literary field of the first half of the 19th century was informed by the male mystifications of Czech women writers. In literary communication, their creators modelled female writers who never existed, invented their life stories and attributed to them the qualities they believed Czech women writers should possess. The first Czech circle of women patriots and writers then had to cope with this legacy. They used a variety of strategies to make their way: their debut collections of poems would refer to their fictional predecessors, they would work on the Czech encyclopaedia, combine writing with educational work, or smoke in public – the last of which was supposed to give the Czech author a George Sandian worldliness. To analyse their positions in the literary field of the first half of the 19th century, I use the term posture, which, following Alain Viala, the Swiss scholar Jérôme Meizoz understands as a unique way of taking a position in the literary field. In the context of history and language, the term posture has two dimensions: it is simultaneously defined as an act and as a discourse. On the one hand, it refers to self-representations within public discourses in literary situations, and on the other hand, it refers to the image itself given through discourse, which rhetoric refers to as ethos.

16

Authors: Jana Števlíková

The article focuses on the poetics of Margita Figuli’s (1909 – 1995) early fiction – it provides interpretation and comparison of her prose works Mámivý dúšok ([Intoxicating sip] published in 1935 in a magazine) and Pokušenie ([Temptation] published in 1934 in a magazine and in 1937 as a book). Both texts are built on the contradiction between male and female characters, their inner conflict, tension between desire (or emotion) and rational reasoning, carnality and eroticism, and the problem of distance and contact that leads to disillusionment. The composition of both novellas is enriched by the alternation of dialogical passages with narrative ones, the inclusion of dream motifs, ideas and memories as a form of escape from reality, and the use of a framing principle that makes the actual inner events fit into a recurrent and universal natural cycle. The paper attempts to identify the elements through which M. Figuli, at this stage in her career, drew on the poetics of modernism (Slovak modernism and the so-called second wave modernism) and the elements through which she anticipated the onset of naturism as a specific style that brought innovation into Slovak literary fiction at that time. In this way, the article accentuates poetological continuity in Slovak literature of the first half of the 20th century.

18

Authors: Marianna Koliová

The article compares the travelogues of Jozef Miloslav Hurban (1817 – 1888) with those written by Terézia Vansová (1857 – 1942). The author treats the texts as examples of (1) the romantic national revivalist travelogue with an ideological (national) focus (Hurban’s travelogues Cesta Slováka k bratrům slavenským na Moravě a v Čechách [The journey of a Slovak to his Slavic brothers in Moravia and Bohemia 1839] 1939, 1841; Prechádzka po považskom svete [A walk in the world of Považie] 1844) and (2) its later, programmatically much sober and down to earth variation associated with the woman’s viewpoint and entertainment function (Vansová’s prose Mrs Georgiadesová on the road. A cheerful travelogue to Prague to an ethnographic exhibition [Pani Georgiadesová na cestách. Veselý cestopis do Prahy na národopisnú výstavu] 1896 – 1897). The core of the analysis is the representation of space and the nature of movement in space. While in the Romantic travelogues, there is a tendency to highlight the immaterial spiritual principle of space and to “tone down” the physicality of the traveller himself, in Vansová’s work, the body of the characters (their hunger, thirst, and fatigue) comes programmatically to the fore and clashes with the “higher” (mostly national revivalist) motives and ideals, without, however, denying them. It is a practice that is typologically very close to the strategies of post-Romantic authors who sought to break away from the poetics of the Romantics and their epigones.

27

Authors: Jana Piroščáková

The paper is devoted to the collection of Amália Sirotková (1813 – 1892) – the oldest known Slovak woman storyteller. Part of her manuscript collection from the 1850s has been preserved thanks to the estate of Pavel Dobšinský (1828 – 1885) who prepared two of her tales for publication in his edition Prostonárodné slovenské povesti (Slovak folk tales, 1880, 1882). The preserved notebooks are probably a fragment of a larger collection, but the extent of the manuscript remains unknown. “Povesti od Amálie Sirotkovej [Tales by Amália Sirotková]” archive stored in the Literary archive of the Slovak National Library in Martin contains three notebooks by A. Sirotková and one notebook written by another person and probably unrelated to A. Sirotková’s collection. The first part of the article reflects on the question of authorship and the extent of the collection. The second part of the papee reconstructs the origin of the collection and outlines the possible ways in which the manuscript of A. Sirotková’s might have reached P. Dobšinský. The aim is not to reflect on the language, spelling, style, or genre of A. Sirotková’s tales, but on the contexts of the collection with regard to parallel manuscript sources and the way it was used by editors of fairy tale books in the 19th century. The third part of the paper deals with this issue in more detail.