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Papers by Richard Müller

Svět literatury, 2024

The paper inquires into the phenomenon of repetition in the works of Franz Kafka and in what ways... more The paper inquires into the phenomenon of repetition in the works of Franz Kafka and in what ways it might characterize his way of writing (and his understanding of writing). I begin by making a distinction between three different planes of repetition, or repetitiveness: (1) as a 'method' of production; (2) as a symptom of the characters' situations; and (3) as a representation technique. First, there are different versions of the same text, equivalent in terms of finality, but perhaps also a certain existential rhythm (as exemplified by Kafka's famous 'schedules'). I suggest that a comparative reading of Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1810) could provide an insight into this feature of 'productivity'. Second, repetitive characters' situations create certain patterns and beg the question of their complex reader effects. Finally, and in addition to 'classical' discursive repetitions, there are minor textual recurrences (as in his 'breakthrough' story, "The Judgment") and the question whether these can be related to an analogy in technical reproduction. Are they part of an experimental narrative method? Is there a 'sense' to repetition in Kafka and can these provisional distinctions help us understand it? How should their entanglement be described?

Svět literatury, 2020

This article presents an interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov's story "The Vane Sisters" in the lig... more This article presents an interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov's story "The Vane Sisters" in the light of Jan Mukařovský's concepts of semantic gesture and unintentionality (nezáměrnost). At the same time, medial implications of Nabokov's text are recognized, forcing a certain modification of the aforementioned concepts, taking into account the phenomenon of medial self-reflectivity.

The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality, ed. Richard Müller, London – New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024

Introduction to The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality (Bloomsbury Academi... more Introduction to The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality (Bloomsbury Academic 2024); subtitled ‘Genealogy of the concept of the medium and literary studies’.

The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality, ed. Richard Müller, London – New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024

Table of Contents of The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality (Bloomsbury Ac... more Table of Contents of The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality (Bloomsbury Academic 2024) written by a team of authors

In: Bruhn, J., López-Varela, A., de Paiva Vieira, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham., 2023

The chapter explores two complementary perspectives: the lack of an explicit focus within semioti... more The chapter explores two complementary perspectives: the lack of an explicit focus within semiotics on media technology and a converse lack of semiotic awareness in the classic media theory.

The slow genesis of the medium concept clearly affected the formation of modern semiotics with Peirce and Saussure. It is shown that within this process, the technological aspect constituted the “place of strongest resistance” and to what extent the subsequent developments in semiotics have been marked by this initial condition.

Technological media science, best represented by Kittler, is then shown to develop out of a blindness to the semiotic implications of its own premises. Even if it allows us to see how new ways of signification come to exist as a result of technical inventions, this insight is preconditioned by a gesture of erasure of semiotic difference. It appears truly ironic that Kittler’s writing is still so semiotically rich.

In the field of intermediality, we can observe an initial reversal in weighing the importance of the cognitive vs the technical dimension of the medium. The consequence of this is that intermedial research has tended to lose sight of the internal logic of media evolution. What has not yet been resolved is how the technical condition should be conceptualized if it contributes to the “qualification” of the medium. It is argued that both semiotics and technics should be seen as converging on a common theoretical terrain, in a complicated, chiasmatic relationship. Technics and semiotics need to be studied together.

in Richard Müller, Tomáš Chudý et al.: Za obrysy média. Literatura a medialita. Praha: Karolinum - Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, 2020

This introduction discusses the points of departure for the book The Emerging Contours of the Med... more This introduction discusses the points of departure for the book The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality. Our primary ambition is to establish the theoretical foundations for the integration of literary and media study. There is little doubt that literature, like other arts, ranks today among what we would call the traditional, or “old media”. And yet the dialogue between the two branches of learning has been far from systematic, not least due to their vastly different genesis (which will also be part of our enquiry). This in itself indicates one of the starting points for our exploration: why was the concept of medium marked by a long-term absence or latency in literary aesthetics and criticism and related disciplines? Why did it only gradually emerge over the course of the last century until it became indispensable, and indeed, almost uncomfortably impossible to avoid? How should we define medium and mediality, given the notorious disparateness of their definitions, and which media theories should be consulted for guidance, given their number and disunity? How should we understand and structure the uneasy linking of the different media modalities and types, including the arts and technical media, or the relation between the classically defined (communication) media and the more general medial phenomena: the mediality of photography and the face of the deceased; the psychological act of remembering and various forms of memoir literature, etc.?
Drawing on the work of John Guillory, Jens Schröter and Georg Christoph Tholen, the first step of our enquiry is to outline a genealogy of the concept of medium. As we argue, however, such genealogy cannot be separated from the “evolution” of media; the elements of its conception are taken from the theories of Manfred Faßler, Jochen Hörisch or Rudolf Stöber. This analytical procedure involves a certain inevitable circulus in probando, or rather spiral reasoning, since those (communication) media processes and functions that emerge over the course of the media and technological “evolution” appear in retrospect as something latently present, in rudimentary form, in the older media technologies.
With this genealogical perspective in mind, we can evaluate the conceptual fields of different periods and orientations in terms of their potential to coordinate the effort towards the systematic integration of both disciplines currently dealing with their subjects rather separately. The motivation for such an effort can be found in the number of unresolved issues in literary research today: the unclear status of “materiality” in literature and literary studies; the variable depth of impact of “new media” (including network writing or the newer forms of AI) on long-established literary cultural processes and practices (including reading and writing); the difficulty of conceptualizing the role of technics and technology, which goes beyond the history of the written culture.

in Richard Müller, Tomáš Chudý et al.: Za obrysy média. Literatura a medialita. Praha: Karolinum - Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, 2020

The final essay of the book The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality takes o... more The final essay of the book The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality takes one last look at the theoretical basis for the establishment of the “media theory of literature”. A collective of authors discusses which theoretical starting points and frameworks are viable, even if they have often been considered as addressing separate issues. These frameworks and approaches are analyzed and discussed from a diachronic and historical point of view – of the emergence of mediality as
both a concept and a phenomenon, or a historical and even evolutionary process.

Authorial subject as a gesture, trace, and hypothesis This dissertation addresses questions conc... more Authorial subject as a gesture, trace, and hypothesis

This dissertation addresses questions concerning the so-called authorial subject of literary text, the concept being shaped by two simultaneous intensities. There is an imaginary, concentrated sense of an author, auctor, „behind“ the text as a living originator, creature of concrete, vibrant, personal experience, even a source of meaning; there is also a contradictory feeling, manifested in the reflection of modern subject in art and philosophy, which in the post-Cartesian line of thinking is meant as nonantonomous, divided, split, and un-conscious. I strove to study carefully the concepts of authorial subject, subject of writing, implied author and other correlative terms in the contexts of structuralist, phenomenological, hermeneutic, semiotic, poststructuralist and cultural materialist literary criticism, aesthetics and philosophy. In my reading, a repeated, recurring process emerged in the studied theoretical material, in which the author became an interpreted, hypothesized fiction exactly in the moments he or she was meant to become identified, categorized and objectified (this came as a common trait in Umberto Eco’s, Wayne C. Booth’s, and – to a lesser degree and always self-consciously – in Miroslav Červenka’s meditations on the topic).
In virtual conversations with the texts of Jan Mukařovský, Émile Benveniste, Michail M. Bakhtin, Miroslav Červenka, Zdeněk Mathauser, Petr A. Bílek, Roland Barthes, Jacquese Derrida, Miroslav Petříček, Michel Foucault, Wayne C. Booth, Gérard Genette, Wolfgang Iser, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Julia Kristeva and Stephen Greenblatt, I attempted to rethink the significance of “the outside” and “the inside” of a text, of how can someone be thought of as speaking or being spoken in literary texts, both narrative genres and poetry, what exactly is the relation between “a textual subject” and “the extratextual individual”, and what it means when a text is thought as being something by meaning something. My own approach could be described as semio-poststructuralist, and in my emphasis on the reading side of the processes, a pragmatic assumption was contained: an effort by the reader to signify. I observed (and reflected in my own interpretative hermeneutics, concentrated on symptomatic, subversive readings of the given texts) how cracks, rifts and fissures of and in the reading process come to provoke interpretation as something that happens, rather than something that simply is; in this happening of text, a process emerges, a self-conscious, self-fashioning process, which brings forth and embodies material density and opaqueness of signifiance, of moving signification. This model of signifiance, based on concepts like semantic gesture, unintentionality, écriture, trait, le sémiotique and social circulation, supports a conception of authorial subject as less a textual function, a sub-iectum, and more as a gestural motion, inherently inscribed with contingency, irregularity and what I come to call – in reference to Roland Barthes’s essays on photograms and photographs and his sens obtuse and punctum – erratic sense. This inherently self-contradictory character of signifying practice is embedded in my own proposal of subjects of authoredness; this model (in chapter VI. 2) reflects the tension between unanthropomorphic disposition of écriture, writing, intextedness, and sense of an anthropomorphic cause of reading reactions, bestirred by concurrent motivities of actualizing text and deferring its „sense“. In this way, the author can re-appear, as with Stephen Greenblatt’s narrativization of his Will Shakespeare, as a trait, resonating voice, re/materialized „presence“, or, with Julia Kristeva, as a bodily wrinkle, scratch of an existence of subject of enunciation. Julia Kristeva’s work, which associates concepts of khora and jouissance with poetical language and observes negative dialectics between phenotext and genotext, is especially instrumental in putting the strict separation of a textual subject and a historical individual into doubt. I also paid attention to a difference between Greenblatt’s and Jacques Derrida’s understanding of trace or trait; while in the first case trace is something which retains the material, the bodily, the tangible in the historical processes of exchange, circulation and cultural “commerce”, Derrida understands trace as a pure difference, différance, which deferres even the “founding” dichotomy of materiality and immateriality. In the last chapter I try to demonstrate, using Miroslav Petříček’s essay “World as an Analogon to Image”, that this feeling of an author as an im/materialized presence/absence, author-trace, author-gesture (gesture which catches our eye, like a “grapheme”) is principally thinkable on the level, where différance deferres the very conception of writing or speach as something fundamentally opposed to an image.
The authorial subject thus emerges from gestural motion through the text, not as a self-conscious projection of an author in his work as his second self, nor a communicational analogue to the implied reader, nor even a partner in dialogue with the reader, unless we understand such a dialogue as an echo of our own voice in “speaking”, like Greenblatt did, “with the dead”. What empowers this resonance, however, is the energia of social and mimetic circulations, density and foldedness of texts, which, however, comes through only in a reading attitude which casts on the folded, wrinkled, ruffled textedness accidentaly an unelucidating, obscuring light.

Bohemica litteraria 24 (2), 69-99, 2021

The body falling apart: Medieval incoherence of Kafka's Contemplation and The Judgment The study ... more The body falling apart: Medieval incoherence of Kafka's Contemplation and The Judgment
The study aims to show how the short stories by Franz Kafka, proverbially challenging with respect to the modern idea of narrative coherence, can be fruitfully read with the help of premodern paradigms and with regard to their medial aspects. In the first part, the authors examine the affinities between Kafka's authorial practices and the pre-Guttenbergian situation. On the material plane, both Kafka and medieval producers create an environment where various manuscript versions of the text exist in parallel and individual fragments are autonomous. We must also note the status of the fragment in Kafka as part of the temporal continuity created by both writing and life. The oft-noted absurdity of Kafka's texts can be validly interpreted as stemming from the "postreligious attitude", where residuals of the medieval idea of divinely sanctioned meaning are transferred into the secular, post-Cartesian world. The second part is focused on Kafka's first published book, Contemplation (Betrachtung, 1912), and two competing modes of coherence: the temporal coherence of a human life that proceeds towards its termination against the spatial coherence of the human body. The first mode relates to the countryside and eventually prevails over the second one, artificial and urban. The scars and wrinkles inscribed in the human face remind the reader of the external force of time, serving a purpose similar to the physical traces of saintly intervention in medieval miracle stories. It is, however, the new status of writing (especially handwriting) in the new media situation that brings the evidence of the body and textual evidence back to close proximity – again, a feature uniting the medieval condition and Kafka's modernity. Descriptions, especially those of gestures – with roots in the Yiddish theatre, open the texture of Kafka's fiction, providing key clues of sense and disorienting at the same time. Finally, the authors turn to The Judgment (Das Urteil, 1913) and present Georg's final suicidal jump as a modern instance of an ordeal ("Gottesurteil"). The world of The Judgment implodes as rhetorical structures inherent to the "text of a quarrel" permeate it. Significantly, however, Georg's death or survival is withheld from us. Considering the final destiny of the protagonist's body might enable readers to establish a coherent meaning of the story and see through all the rhetorical traps set inside. The challenge to coherence posed in the text continues – in reading rather than perpetuity

in Lessons from Kafka: Philosophical Readings of Franz Kafka's Works; edd. Tomáš Koblížek, Petr Koťátko. Filosofia, 2021

Kafka’s literary work, created in the time of the first expansion of telecommunications and in ta... more Kafka’s literary work, created in the time of the first expansion of telecommunications and in tacit relation to the emerging analogue media, represents various instances of malfunctioning between the constituents of the information exchange. The idea suggests itself to transpose certain thematic elements of Kafka’s writing into the components of information theory. Given that its terms are better tailored to dealing with the transmission of information rather than the processes of meaning interpretation, how should we understand such analogy? This paper approaches the question firstly by overviewing the various changes of the concept of noise in the contexts of information theory, Umberto Eco’s ‘open work’ poetics, Miroslav Červenka’s literary semiotics and Michel Serres’ philosophy. It is shown how the concept of noise is redefined – from a physical phenomenon occurring on the channel to interference which depends on the existence of codes as certain operational sets of probabilities and expectations. In Serres, however, noise becomes the unavoidable foundation of communication and its paradoxical driving force.
The emergence of noise in the new reproduction apparatuses and its profusion in communication is connected with melancholy in Kafka. As the examples of The Trial and the later short story ‘Poseidon’ suggest, there seems to be an interconnection in the behaviour patterns of the physical systems, as described by the contemporary statistical mechanics models, and the communication systems defined by the impossibility to yield information. The exponential growth of signs arising without possibility of verification and the interference of noise in communication and the physical environment result in the collapse of the boundary between the internal and the external environments. Kafka’s literary experiments (incl. ‘The Cares of a Family Man’ and ‘The Judgement’) can be understood as attempting to grasp the possibilities of writing under the conditions of the desacralisation of sense.

Slovo a smysl, 2020

This study aims to reconstruct the impact of information theory (and cybernetics) on literary the... more This study aims to reconstruct the impact of information theory (and cybernetics) on literary theory (semiotics) during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the directions in which the same paradigm came to inspire 1960s Czech experimental poetry. Given the limitations of information theory vis-à-vis some crucial questions of communication, what was the foundation of this inspiration? The first part of the study concentrates on various important modifications of the paradigm in the context of information aesthetics (Max Bense), information poetics (Umberto Eco) and structuralist literary theory (Miroslav Červenka). The second part explores the position of the 'information' current within the context of 1960s Czech experimental poetry, including its avant-garde antecedents. The third part focuses on the experimental texts of Zdeněk Barborka, whose work is notable for being situated at the crossroads of several different tendencies. Finally, the study raises the question concerning the deeper implications of the 'information moment', with the suggestion that they might be found in the context of the development of media (communication) technologies as well as the genealogy of the media discourse, which emerges at this 'moment' from its prehistory to enter into its actual historical phase.

Slovo a slovesnost, 2020

The article addresses problems of mediality in the context of the Prague School in its classical ... more The article addresses problems of mediality in the context of the Prague School in its classical period. Drawing from John Guillory's study "Genesis of the Media Concept", we work on the hypothesis that new technical media and technologies exerted pressure in the theoretical discourse of the Prague School, via the mutual reflexion of the avantgarde (Nezval, Štyrský, functionalist architecture, the avantgarde theater) and Structuralist thought, to formulate a shift in the delimitation of art. First, we observe the variety of influences that the discourse on film and modern and avantgarde theater had on the Structuralist concepts of the sign, the understanding of the actor or of temporality in art. We further note the tension between linguistic and architectural functionalism in the Prague School thinking and how this tension translates into Mukařovský's concept of the aesthetic function. Functionalist avantgarde architecture, as we observe, fundamentally influenced Muka řovský's cultural anthropological theory of functions. On the basis of these converging factors, leading, among other things, to the growing strategic importance of the concept of communication, we conclude by characterizing what we call latent medial traces of certain notions and returning ideas of Prague School theories (apart from sign, the concepts of semantic gesture and unintentionality).

Dějiny - teorie - kritika, 2018

The article looks at basic questions concerning mediality, which it defines as a common attribute... more The article looks at basic questions concerning mediality, which it defines as a common attribute of techno-anthropological means of representation and communication, as developed and developing through mutual interaction, such as to give rise to a particular environment in which certain forms (of sense) can be distinguished. Among the basic questions of mediality and media are thus also those of whether and to what extent media conceptualize their own history and development. The study presents – primarily from the perspective of the theory and history of literature and art – a critical overview of media theory, starting with the ideas of Friedrich Kittler. It compares these with certain aspects of Marshall McLuhan’s thought, pointing out a conflict between the concept of an escalating development of media towards a closed cybernetic loop, and the concept of media as an evolutionary extension of human senses. The rhetorical and stylistic aspects of Kittler’s perspective are interpreted through Bürger’s (and Benjamin’s) thesis of the melancholic dimension of modernism. The basic principles of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of systems are analysed as a stimulus for thinking about mediality, together with his concept of a system of art as a functionally differentiated social system, historically established with the dawning of the modern age. We also pay attention to the intermedial research carried out by Lars Elleström and his description of a system of modalities, which sets up a new frame for approaching media. Elleström’s model enables us to reflect on media from many varied perspectives (such as mass media studies, new media, film media, film science, art history and theory, literary criticism, etc.), yet does not cover sources of media dynamics; these may relate to a certain gap or difference that enters the relationship between consciousness and communication, technology and the body, technology and the senses, and seems to set in motion the development of these constantly changing techno-anthropological tools.

In this article, the question of the specific logic underlying the New Historical conception of t... more In this article, the question of the specific logic underlying the New Historical conception of the relation between text and context leads, first, to the exploration of the extent to which Stephen Greenblatt builds his analysis of the English Renaissance theatre on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological conception of general economy of practices and symbolic goods. It is shown, secondly, how the New Historical latent conception of symbolic economy is built on the precondition of heteronomy of different social and cultural fields in the early modern period. Also, it is pointed out how New Historicism develops a self-reflective strategy within its historical epistemology by incorporating itself into the tradition of cultural critique born in the context of the “conquest” of the New World
whereby a category of cultural difference was generated. Thirdly, both conceptions of symbolic economy (Bourdieu’s and Greenblatt’s) are compared to the project of Georges Bataille of “accursed share”, developed in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and his outline of a peculiar logic of general economy, which negates the very foundations of economic thinking. It is explained how all three conceptions are based on Marcel Mauss’s “discovery” of the economy of gift in archaic societies (later critiques of Mauss’s interpretation of the ethnographic material are taken into account). Bataille’s perspective of general economy is followed, where various historical societies face the problem of surplus and
where the consumption of excessive resources acquires different forms of creativity in art, and destructivity in war and sacrifice. Bataille’s “delirant vision” (Goux) is taken as providing a possible critical angle on the limits of the “symbolic economies” of New Historicism and Bourdieu’s sociology not only as their analytical tools, but also as part of their own foundations as scholarly projects. Finally, the New Historical relation to the rhetorical tradition is understood as a moment whereby
the limits of its symbolic economy (its subordination to the logic of capital accumulation) might be paradoxically transcended.

Nemohu Ti říci přesně, jak pozdě je, když píšu tento dopis, protože hodinky leží na židli pár kro... more Nemohu Ti říci přesně, jak pozdě je, když píšu tento dopis, protože hodinky leží na židli pár kroků ode mne, ale já se neodvažuji dojít tam a podívat se, musí být už blízko k ránu. (Kafka [ -]: ) V tomto úryvku, mezi Kafkovými dopisy Felici nikterak výjimečném ani netypickém, se čas psaní zdá být přítomen (zpřítomněn) ve své fenomenální jednotě, jako něco, co probíhá -a zároveň je zaznamenáváno -v současném okamžiku. Pocit přítomnosti je natolik silný, že znemožňuje zachytit čas logikou časomíry ("nemohu Ti říci přesně, jak pozdě je"), a vnoření se do procesu produkce tak intenzivní, že musí svým tématem činit sebe sama: "a já se musím snažit psát zřetelně". Je tu však samozřejmě již od počátku i opačný pohyb, který sebereferenční "přítomnost" pisatele vyvažuje: vyzdvižení času recepce. A záměrem tohoto protipohybu je vtahovat dovnitř, do takto vytvořeného virtuálního časoprostoru, autorovu nastávající čtenářku. Podmínkou prolnutí dvou časů -konstruovaného času produkce a předjímaného času čtení -je to, že adresátka listu přistoupí na hru "moje čtení teď je v tomto umělém čase souběžné s jeho psaním tehdy". Jejich ve skutečnosti nevyhnutelný nesoulad motivuje onu žertovnou a jemnou nabídku, jíž se text dobrovolně vystavuje možnosti, že bude odložen (a tedy přestane být i "psán"), jejímž výsledkem však nejspíše bude (můžeme jen předpokládat) setrvání při čteném. Použili jsme spojení: konstruovaný čas produkce. V jakém poměru stojí k výše zmíněným tradičním pojmům? Čas vyprávění (Erzählzeit) a vyprávěný čas (erzählte Zeit) rozlišil v kontextu své "morfologické poetiky" ( ) Günther Müller. K vyprávění příběhu je podle něj potřeba určitého množství "fyzikálního času" (Müller : ). A jelikož měření času předpokládá a vnucuje času prostorovou povahu ("když hvězda nebo ručička hodin urazí takovou či onakou vzdálenost v prostoru, pak čas uběhl tak a tak ‚dlouhý'"; ibid.), není zásadní rozdíl, činíme -li měřítkem času vyprávění počet stránek nebo počet minut. Píše doslova: "kdyby existovala stránková norma, měli bychom stejně užitečnou jednotku, jakou poskytuje normativní časomíra" (ibid.: ). Günther Müller ponechává tedy otevřeny přinejmenším tři způsoby, jak čas vyprávění nahlížet: čas, který vyžaduje mluvená či psaná prezentace příběhu; čas, který uplývá s jejich poslechem či čtením; "čas" (metonymicky) zpředmětněný v rozloze textu. Německý literární historik nemá na mysli čas empirický: jak dlouho skutečně trvá přečíst či vyprávět příběh, čas, který trvalo určitý text vytvořit, či přeneseně: tloušťku knihy. To je jeden z momentů, který byl převzat strukturální naratologií: čas vyprávění Nezvyšuje pro nás působivost této hry vědomí, že spolu s Kafkovou nepublikovanou prózou, náčrty, fragmenty, poznámkami a deníky měl Max Brod na autorovo přání zničit i jeho korespondenci? Jinými slovy: nejenže čteme dopisy určené cizím očím, ale dopisy, které měly zmizet z tváře světa vůbec. Müllerovu koncepci a její rozdílnost vůči pozdějšímu Genettovu modelu výborně komentuje Ricoeur ( : -), přičemž připomíná její přírodně -lozo cký podtext, tj. goethovskou morfologii rostlin a zvířat.

The article expounds the intellectual genealogy and development of Cultural Materialism and New H... more The article expounds the intellectual genealogy and development of Cultural Materialism and New Historicism; it also takes into account the genesis of Cultural Studies. The main point of departure and perspective for this inquiry is provided by the work and thought of Raymond Williams, in its constants and variables. The article further examines the relative positions of both critical currents, their fundamental concepts, correspondences and tensions and explores the meanings and perspectives of “materialism” in the criticism of literature and culture.

In this paper, the authors offer an overview and analysis of Roman O. Jakobson's concept of " art... more In this paper, the authors offer an overview and analysis of Roman O. Jakobson's concept of " artifice " and contextualize this concept within two critical traditions: functional aesthetics and sign theory. Within both traditions and through several examples the paper draws attention to certain weak points of this concept, namely the problematic assumption of the immanent character of parallelism as an artistic procedure as well as its unclear position within the Saussurean and Peircean semiological paradigms. Lastly, the concept of artifice is briefl y contextualized within what could be called inherent symmetricism of certain trends of 20th century literary theory.

In this study I am trying to address the connection between literature and ideology. Like Denys ... more In this study I am trying to address the connection between literature and ideology. Like Denys Turner, I define ideology as a preformative contradiction (contradiction between what you are doing in saying something, and what you are doing by means of saying it) which has become socialized and ritualized, i. e. materialized within social organization. In Paul de Man’s theory, the sphere continuously assimilating performative contradiction as such is rhetoric, the figurative potency of language intensified in literary discourse. In such view, it is ideological to contend that reference is something phenomenal, given to perception, rather than an effect of language. An analogous ideological tendency, however, can be seen in maintaing that the “inner” functioning of literary texts is different in principle to its “outer” functioning, i. e. axiomatical seperation of material-empirical dimension of text from the author-text-reader interaction, as it is attempted by Umberto Eco, who, however, continuously encounters difficulties in performing such analytical operation (wherein I see the inspirational sense of his theory). The relation between literary text and ideology is, in my view, de/constructive; on the one hand, literature continuously generates strategies of implicit persuasion, allowing to ritualize fundamental social performative contradictions, and thus to obliterate the difference between symbolic acts and acts by means of symbols. On the other hand, this very “productivity” of literature constitutes possibilities of intervention in ideological order. Reading Milan Kundera symptomatically, for instance, allows to register the contradiction between the fabulas of his novels and their anti-panoptical “ethics” and discoursive tactics of the supervisory narrator/career-author figure.

Drafts by Richard Müller

Lessons from Kafka

Kafka’s literary work, created in the time of the first expansion of telecommunications and in co... more Kafka’s literary work, created in the time of the first expansion of telecommunications and in conjunction with the emerging analogue media of the fin de siècle, represents various instances of communicational failure, misunderstanding, and malfunction of the various points and links of the information exchange. The idea suggests itself to transpose certain thematic elements of Kafka’s writing into the components of information theory. However, given that the terms of information theory are better tailored to dealing with the transmission of information rather than the processes of meaning interpretation, how should we understand such analogies? This paper approaches the question firstly by overviewing the development of the concept of noise in the contexts of information theory, Umberto Eco’s ‘open work’ poetics, Miroslav Červenka’s literary semiotics and, later, Michel Serres’ philosophy of science. It will be shown how the concept of noise is redefined from a physical phenomenon occurring on the channel, which is obviated by statistic calculations, to creative cultural interference which depends on the existence of linguistic and aesthetic codes. For instance, in Červenka’s theory the channel is conceived of as a structure of codes, and a code becomes a certain operational set of probabilities and expectations. In literary work, information grows in depth and the process of sense is exposed. In Serres’ philosophy, noise becomes the unavoidable foundation of communication and its paradoxical driving force.
In the face of the emerging noise of the telecommunications era and analogue sound and image reproduction apparatuses, Kafka’s strategy is the creation of what I interpret as the melancholic representation of this condition and an emphasis on the advantages of pen writing as a space of internality and silence. However, as the examples of The Trial and the later short story ‘Poseidon’ suggest, there seems to be an interconnection in the behaviour patterns of the physical systems as described by the contemporary thermodynamic (statistical mechanics) models and the communication systems defined by the impossibility to yield information: The exponential growth of signs with no possibility of verification as well as the interference of noise in the physical environment and communication result in the collapse of the boundary between the internal and the external environments. Kafka’s literary experiments (‘The Cares of the Family Man’ and ‘The Judgement’) can be understood as attempting to understand the positive possibilities of writing under the conditions of the desacralisation of sense (bureaucratization, the fall of the father figure) and of the expansion of noise environments.

Svět literatury, 2024

The paper inquires into the phenomenon of repetition in the works of Franz Kafka and in what ways... more The paper inquires into the phenomenon of repetition in the works of Franz Kafka and in what ways it might characterize his way of writing (and his understanding of writing). I begin by making a distinction between three different planes of repetition, or repetitiveness: (1) as a 'method' of production; (2) as a symptom of the characters' situations; and (3) as a representation technique. First, there are different versions of the same text, equivalent in terms of finality, but perhaps also a certain existential rhythm (as exemplified by Kafka's famous 'schedules'). I suggest that a comparative reading of Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1810) could provide an insight into this feature of 'productivity'. Second, repetitive characters' situations create certain patterns and beg the question of their complex reader effects. Finally, and in addition to 'classical' discursive repetitions, there are minor textual recurrences (as in his 'breakthrough' story, "The Judgment") and the question whether these can be related to an analogy in technical reproduction. Are they part of an experimental narrative method? Is there a 'sense' to repetition in Kafka and can these provisional distinctions help us understand it? How should their entanglement be described?

Svět literatury, 2020

This article presents an interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov's story "The Vane Sisters" in the lig... more This article presents an interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov's story "The Vane Sisters" in the light of Jan Mukařovský's concepts of semantic gesture and unintentionality (nezáměrnost). At the same time, medial implications of Nabokov's text are recognized, forcing a certain modification of the aforementioned concepts, taking into account the phenomenon of medial self-reflectivity.

The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality, ed. Richard Müller, London – New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024

Introduction to The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality (Bloomsbury Academi... more Introduction to The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality (Bloomsbury Academic 2024); subtitled ‘Genealogy of the concept of the medium and literary studies’.

The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality, ed. Richard Müller, London – New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024

Table of Contents of The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality (Bloomsbury Ac... more Table of Contents of The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality (Bloomsbury Academic 2024) written by a team of authors

In: Bruhn, J., López-Varela, A., de Paiva Vieira, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham., 2023

The chapter explores two complementary perspectives: the lack of an explicit focus within semioti... more The chapter explores two complementary perspectives: the lack of an explicit focus within semiotics on media technology and a converse lack of semiotic awareness in the classic media theory.

The slow genesis of the medium concept clearly affected the formation of modern semiotics with Peirce and Saussure. It is shown that within this process, the technological aspect constituted the “place of strongest resistance” and to what extent the subsequent developments in semiotics have been marked by this initial condition.

Technological media science, best represented by Kittler, is then shown to develop out of a blindness to the semiotic implications of its own premises. Even if it allows us to see how new ways of signification come to exist as a result of technical inventions, this insight is preconditioned by a gesture of erasure of semiotic difference. It appears truly ironic that Kittler’s writing is still so semiotically rich.

In the field of intermediality, we can observe an initial reversal in weighing the importance of the cognitive vs the technical dimension of the medium. The consequence of this is that intermedial research has tended to lose sight of the internal logic of media evolution. What has not yet been resolved is how the technical condition should be conceptualized if it contributes to the “qualification” of the medium. It is argued that both semiotics and technics should be seen as converging on a common theoretical terrain, in a complicated, chiasmatic relationship. Technics and semiotics need to be studied together.

in Richard Müller, Tomáš Chudý et al.: Za obrysy média. Literatura a medialita. Praha: Karolinum - Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, 2020

This introduction discusses the points of departure for the book The Emerging Contours of the Med... more This introduction discusses the points of departure for the book The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality. Our primary ambition is to establish the theoretical foundations for the integration of literary and media study. There is little doubt that literature, like other arts, ranks today among what we would call the traditional, or “old media”. And yet the dialogue between the two branches of learning has been far from systematic, not least due to their vastly different genesis (which will also be part of our enquiry). This in itself indicates one of the starting points for our exploration: why was the concept of medium marked by a long-term absence or latency in literary aesthetics and criticism and related disciplines? Why did it only gradually emerge over the course of the last century until it became indispensable, and indeed, almost uncomfortably impossible to avoid? How should we define medium and mediality, given the notorious disparateness of their definitions, and which media theories should be consulted for guidance, given their number and disunity? How should we understand and structure the uneasy linking of the different media modalities and types, including the arts and technical media, or the relation between the classically defined (communication) media and the more general medial phenomena: the mediality of photography and the face of the deceased; the psychological act of remembering and various forms of memoir literature, etc.?
Drawing on the work of John Guillory, Jens Schröter and Georg Christoph Tholen, the first step of our enquiry is to outline a genealogy of the concept of medium. As we argue, however, such genealogy cannot be separated from the “evolution” of media; the elements of its conception are taken from the theories of Manfred Faßler, Jochen Hörisch or Rudolf Stöber. This analytical procedure involves a certain inevitable circulus in probando, or rather spiral reasoning, since those (communication) media processes and functions that emerge over the course of the media and technological “evolution” appear in retrospect as something latently present, in rudimentary form, in the older media technologies.
With this genealogical perspective in mind, we can evaluate the conceptual fields of different periods and orientations in terms of their potential to coordinate the effort towards the systematic integration of both disciplines currently dealing with their subjects rather separately. The motivation for such an effort can be found in the number of unresolved issues in literary research today: the unclear status of “materiality” in literature and literary studies; the variable depth of impact of “new media” (including network writing or the newer forms of AI) on long-established literary cultural processes and practices (including reading and writing); the difficulty of conceptualizing the role of technics and technology, which goes beyond the history of the written culture.

in Richard Müller, Tomáš Chudý et al.: Za obrysy média. Literatura a medialita. Praha: Karolinum - Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, 2020

The final essay of the book The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality takes o... more The final essay of the book The Emerging Contours of the Medium: Literature and Mediality takes one last look at the theoretical basis for the establishment of the “media theory of literature”. A collective of authors discusses which theoretical starting points and frameworks are viable, even if they have often been considered as addressing separate issues. These frameworks and approaches are analyzed and discussed from a diachronic and historical point of view – of the emergence of mediality as
both a concept and a phenomenon, or a historical and even evolutionary process.

Authorial subject as a gesture, trace, and hypothesis This dissertation addresses questions conc... more Authorial subject as a gesture, trace, and hypothesis

This dissertation addresses questions concerning the so-called authorial subject of literary text, the concept being shaped by two simultaneous intensities. There is an imaginary, concentrated sense of an author, auctor, „behind“ the text as a living originator, creature of concrete, vibrant, personal experience, even a source of meaning; there is also a contradictory feeling, manifested in the reflection of modern subject in art and philosophy, which in the post-Cartesian line of thinking is meant as nonantonomous, divided, split, and un-conscious. I strove to study carefully the concepts of authorial subject, subject of writing, implied author and other correlative terms in the contexts of structuralist, phenomenological, hermeneutic, semiotic, poststructuralist and cultural materialist literary criticism, aesthetics and philosophy. In my reading, a repeated, recurring process emerged in the studied theoretical material, in which the author became an interpreted, hypothesized fiction exactly in the moments he or she was meant to become identified, categorized and objectified (this came as a common trait in Umberto Eco’s, Wayne C. Booth’s, and – to a lesser degree and always self-consciously – in Miroslav Červenka’s meditations on the topic).
In virtual conversations with the texts of Jan Mukařovský, Émile Benveniste, Michail M. Bakhtin, Miroslav Červenka, Zdeněk Mathauser, Petr A. Bílek, Roland Barthes, Jacquese Derrida, Miroslav Petříček, Michel Foucault, Wayne C. Booth, Gérard Genette, Wolfgang Iser, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Julia Kristeva and Stephen Greenblatt, I attempted to rethink the significance of “the outside” and “the inside” of a text, of how can someone be thought of as speaking or being spoken in literary texts, both narrative genres and poetry, what exactly is the relation between “a textual subject” and “the extratextual individual”, and what it means when a text is thought as being something by meaning something. My own approach could be described as semio-poststructuralist, and in my emphasis on the reading side of the processes, a pragmatic assumption was contained: an effort by the reader to signify. I observed (and reflected in my own interpretative hermeneutics, concentrated on symptomatic, subversive readings of the given texts) how cracks, rifts and fissures of and in the reading process come to provoke interpretation as something that happens, rather than something that simply is; in this happening of text, a process emerges, a self-conscious, self-fashioning process, which brings forth and embodies material density and opaqueness of signifiance, of moving signification. This model of signifiance, based on concepts like semantic gesture, unintentionality, écriture, trait, le sémiotique and social circulation, supports a conception of authorial subject as less a textual function, a sub-iectum, and more as a gestural motion, inherently inscribed with contingency, irregularity and what I come to call – in reference to Roland Barthes’s essays on photograms and photographs and his sens obtuse and punctum – erratic sense. This inherently self-contradictory character of signifying practice is embedded in my own proposal of subjects of authoredness; this model (in chapter VI. 2) reflects the tension between unanthropomorphic disposition of écriture, writing, intextedness, and sense of an anthropomorphic cause of reading reactions, bestirred by concurrent motivities of actualizing text and deferring its „sense“. In this way, the author can re-appear, as with Stephen Greenblatt’s narrativization of his Will Shakespeare, as a trait, resonating voice, re/materialized „presence“, or, with Julia Kristeva, as a bodily wrinkle, scratch of an existence of subject of enunciation. Julia Kristeva’s work, which associates concepts of khora and jouissance with poetical language and observes negative dialectics between phenotext and genotext, is especially instrumental in putting the strict separation of a textual subject and a historical individual into doubt. I also paid attention to a difference between Greenblatt’s and Jacques Derrida’s understanding of trace or trait; while in the first case trace is something which retains the material, the bodily, the tangible in the historical processes of exchange, circulation and cultural “commerce”, Derrida understands trace as a pure difference, différance, which deferres even the “founding” dichotomy of materiality and immateriality. In the last chapter I try to demonstrate, using Miroslav Petříček’s essay “World as an Analogon to Image”, that this feeling of an author as an im/materialized presence/absence, author-trace, author-gesture (gesture which catches our eye, like a “grapheme”) is principally thinkable on the level, where différance deferres the very conception of writing or speach as something fundamentally opposed to an image.
The authorial subject thus emerges from gestural motion through the text, not as a self-conscious projection of an author in his work as his second self, nor a communicational analogue to the implied reader, nor even a partner in dialogue with the reader, unless we understand such a dialogue as an echo of our own voice in “speaking”, like Greenblatt did, “with the dead”. What empowers this resonance, however, is the energia of social and mimetic circulations, density and foldedness of texts, which, however, comes through only in a reading attitude which casts on the folded, wrinkled, ruffled textedness accidentaly an unelucidating, obscuring light.

Bohemica litteraria 24 (2), 69-99, 2021

The body falling apart: Medieval incoherence of Kafka's Contemplation and The Judgment The study ... more The body falling apart: Medieval incoherence of Kafka's Contemplation and The Judgment
The study aims to show how the short stories by Franz Kafka, proverbially challenging with respect to the modern idea of narrative coherence, can be fruitfully read with the help of premodern paradigms and with regard to their medial aspects. In the first part, the authors examine the affinities between Kafka's authorial practices and the pre-Guttenbergian situation. On the material plane, both Kafka and medieval producers create an environment where various manuscript versions of the text exist in parallel and individual fragments are autonomous. We must also note the status of the fragment in Kafka as part of the temporal continuity created by both writing and life. The oft-noted absurdity of Kafka's texts can be validly interpreted as stemming from the "postreligious attitude", where residuals of the medieval idea of divinely sanctioned meaning are transferred into the secular, post-Cartesian world. The second part is focused on Kafka's first published book, Contemplation (Betrachtung, 1912), and two competing modes of coherence: the temporal coherence of a human life that proceeds towards its termination against the spatial coherence of the human body. The first mode relates to the countryside and eventually prevails over the second one, artificial and urban. The scars and wrinkles inscribed in the human face remind the reader of the external force of time, serving a purpose similar to the physical traces of saintly intervention in medieval miracle stories. It is, however, the new status of writing (especially handwriting) in the new media situation that brings the evidence of the body and textual evidence back to close proximity – again, a feature uniting the medieval condition and Kafka's modernity. Descriptions, especially those of gestures – with roots in the Yiddish theatre, open the texture of Kafka's fiction, providing key clues of sense and disorienting at the same time. Finally, the authors turn to The Judgment (Das Urteil, 1913) and present Georg's final suicidal jump as a modern instance of an ordeal ("Gottesurteil"). The world of The Judgment implodes as rhetorical structures inherent to the "text of a quarrel" permeate it. Significantly, however, Georg's death or survival is withheld from us. Considering the final destiny of the protagonist's body might enable readers to establish a coherent meaning of the story and see through all the rhetorical traps set inside. The challenge to coherence posed in the text continues – in reading rather than perpetuity

in Lessons from Kafka: Philosophical Readings of Franz Kafka's Works; edd. Tomáš Koblížek, Petr Koťátko. Filosofia, 2021

Kafka’s literary work, created in the time of the first expansion of telecommunications and in ta... more Kafka’s literary work, created in the time of the first expansion of telecommunications and in tacit relation to the emerging analogue media, represents various instances of malfunctioning between the constituents of the information exchange. The idea suggests itself to transpose certain thematic elements of Kafka’s writing into the components of information theory. Given that its terms are better tailored to dealing with the transmission of information rather than the processes of meaning interpretation, how should we understand such analogy? This paper approaches the question firstly by overviewing the various changes of the concept of noise in the contexts of information theory, Umberto Eco’s ‘open work’ poetics, Miroslav Červenka’s literary semiotics and Michel Serres’ philosophy. It is shown how the concept of noise is redefined – from a physical phenomenon occurring on the channel to interference which depends on the existence of codes as certain operational sets of probabilities and expectations. In Serres, however, noise becomes the unavoidable foundation of communication and its paradoxical driving force.
The emergence of noise in the new reproduction apparatuses and its profusion in communication is connected with melancholy in Kafka. As the examples of The Trial and the later short story ‘Poseidon’ suggest, there seems to be an interconnection in the behaviour patterns of the physical systems, as described by the contemporary statistical mechanics models, and the communication systems defined by the impossibility to yield information. The exponential growth of signs arising without possibility of verification and the interference of noise in communication and the physical environment result in the collapse of the boundary between the internal and the external environments. Kafka’s literary experiments (incl. ‘The Cares of a Family Man’ and ‘The Judgement’) can be understood as attempting to grasp the possibilities of writing under the conditions of the desacralisation of sense.

Slovo a smysl, 2020

This study aims to reconstruct the impact of information theory (and cybernetics) on literary the... more This study aims to reconstruct the impact of information theory (and cybernetics) on literary theory (semiotics) during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the directions in which the same paradigm came to inspire 1960s Czech experimental poetry. Given the limitations of information theory vis-à-vis some crucial questions of communication, what was the foundation of this inspiration? The first part of the study concentrates on various important modifications of the paradigm in the context of information aesthetics (Max Bense), information poetics (Umberto Eco) and structuralist literary theory (Miroslav Červenka). The second part explores the position of the 'information' current within the context of 1960s Czech experimental poetry, including its avant-garde antecedents. The third part focuses on the experimental texts of Zdeněk Barborka, whose work is notable for being situated at the crossroads of several different tendencies. Finally, the study raises the question concerning the deeper implications of the 'information moment', with the suggestion that they might be found in the context of the development of media (communication) technologies as well as the genealogy of the media discourse, which emerges at this 'moment' from its prehistory to enter into its actual historical phase.

Slovo a slovesnost, 2020

The article addresses problems of mediality in the context of the Prague School in its classical ... more The article addresses problems of mediality in the context of the Prague School in its classical period. Drawing from John Guillory's study "Genesis of the Media Concept", we work on the hypothesis that new technical media and technologies exerted pressure in the theoretical discourse of the Prague School, via the mutual reflexion of the avantgarde (Nezval, Štyrský, functionalist architecture, the avantgarde theater) and Structuralist thought, to formulate a shift in the delimitation of art. First, we observe the variety of influences that the discourse on film and modern and avantgarde theater had on the Structuralist concepts of the sign, the understanding of the actor or of temporality in art. We further note the tension between linguistic and architectural functionalism in the Prague School thinking and how this tension translates into Mukařovský's concept of the aesthetic function. Functionalist avantgarde architecture, as we observe, fundamentally influenced Muka řovský's cultural anthropological theory of functions. On the basis of these converging factors, leading, among other things, to the growing strategic importance of the concept of communication, we conclude by characterizing what we call latent medial traces of certain notions and returning ideas of Prague School theories (apart from sign, the concepts of semantic gesture and unintentionality).

Dějiny - teorie - kritika, 2018

The article looks at basic questions concerning mediality, which it defines as a common attribute... more The article looks at basic questions concerning mediality, which it defines as a common attribute of techno-anthropological means of representation and communication, as developed and developing through mutual interaction, such as to give rise to a particular environment in which certain forms (of sense) can be distinguished. Among the basic questions of mediality and media are thus also those of whether and to what extent media conceptualize their own history and development. The study presents – primarily from the perspective of the theory and history of literature and art – a critical overview of media theory, starting with the ideas of Friedrich Kittler. It compares these with certain aspects of Marshall McLuhan’s thought, pointing out a conflict between the concept of an escalating development of media towards a closed cybernetic loop, and the concept of media as an evolutionary extension of human senses. The rhetorical and stylistic aspects of Kittler’s perspective are interpreted through Bürger’s (and Benjamin’s) thesis of the melancholic dimension of modernism. The basic principles of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of systems are analysed as a stimulus for thinking about mediality, together with his concept of a system of art as a functionally differentiated social system, historically established with the dawning of the modern age. We also pay attention to the intermedial research carried out by Lars Elleström and his description of a system of modalities, which sets up a new frame for approaching media. Elleström’s model enables us to reflect on media from many varied perspectives (such as mass media studies, new media, film media, film science, art history and theory, literary criticism, etc.), yet does not cover sources of media dynamics; these may relate to a certain gap or difference that enters the relationship between consciousness and communication, technology and the body, technology and the senses, and seems to set in motion the development of these constantly changing techno-anthropological tools.

In this article, the question of the specific logic underlying the New Historical conception of t... more In this article, the question of the specific logic underlying the New Historical conception of the relation between text and context leads, first, to the exploration of the extent to which Stephen Greenblatt builds his analysis of the English Renaissance theatre on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological conception of general economy of practices and symbolic goods. It is shown, secondly, how the New Historical latent conception of symbolic economy is built on the precondition of heteronomy of different social and cultural fields in the early modern period. Also, it is pointed out how New Historicism develops a self-reflective strategy within its historical epistemology by incorporating itself into the tradition of cultural critique born in the context of the “conquest” of the New World
whereby a category of cultural difference was generated. Thirdly, both conceptions of symbolic economy (Bourdieu’s and Greenblatt’s) are compared to the project of Georges Bataille of “accursed share”, developed in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and his outline of a peculiar logic of general economy, which negates the very foundations of economic thinking. It is explained how all three conceptions are based on Marcel Mauss’s “discovery” of the economy of gift in archaic societies (later critiques of Mauss’s interpretation of the ethnographic material are taken into account). Bataille’s perspective of general economy is followed, where various historical societies face the problem of surplus and
where the consumption of excessive resources acquires different forms of creativity in art, and destructivity in war and sacrifice. Bataille’s “delirant vision” (Goux) is taken as providing a possible critical angle on the limits of the “symbolic economies” of New Historicism and Bourdieu’s sociology not only as their analytical tools, but also as part of their own foundations as scholarly projects. Finally, the New Historical relation to the rhetorical tradition is understood as a moment whereby
the limits of its symbolic economy (its subordination to the logic of capital accumulation) might be paradoxically transcended.

Nemohu Ti říci přesně, jak pozdě je, když píšu tento dopis, protože hodinky leží na židli pár kro... more Nemohu Ti říci přesně, jak pozdě je, když píšu tento dopis, protože hodinky leží na židli pár kroků ode mne, ale já se neodvažuji dojít tam a podívat se, musí být už blízko k ránu. (Kafka [ -]: ) V tomto úryvku, mezi Kafkovými dopisy Felici nikterak výjimečném ani netypickém, se čas psaní zdá být přítomen (zpřítomněn) ve své fenomenální jednotě, jako něco, co probíhá -a zároveň je zaznamenáváno -v současném okamžiku. Pocit přítomnosti je natolik silný, že znemožňuje zachytit čas logikou časomíry ("nemohu Ti říci přesně, jak pozdě je"), a vnoření se do procesu produkce tak intenzivní, že musí svým tématem činit sebe sama: "a já se musím snažit psát zřetelně". Je tu však samozřejmě již od počátku i opačný pohyb, který sebereferenční "přítomnost" pisatele vyvažuje: vyzdvižení času recepce. A záměrem tohoto protipohybu je vtahovat dovnitř, do takto vytvořeného virtuálního časoprostoru, autorovu nastávající čtenářku. Podmínkou prolnutí dvou časů -konstruovaného času produkce a předjímaného času čtení -je to, že adresátka listu přistoupí na hru "moje čtení teď je v tomto umělém čase souběžné s jeho psaním tehdy". Jejich ve skutečnosti nevyhnutelný nesoulad motivuje onu žertovnou a jemnou nabídku, jíž se text dobrovolně vystavuje možnosti, že bude odložen (a tedy přestane být i "psán"), jejímž výsledkem však nejspíše bude (můžeme jen předpokládat) setrvání při čteném. Použili jsme spojení: konstruovaný čas produkce. V jakém poměru stojí k výše zmíněným tradičním pojmům? Čas vyprávění (Erzählzeit) a vyprávěný čas (erzählte Zeit) rozlišil v kontextu své "morfologické poetiky" ( ) Günther Müller. K vyprávění příběhu je podle něj potřeba určitého množství "fyzikálního času" (Müller : ). A jelikož měření času předpokládá a vnucuje času prostorovou povahu ("když hvězda nebo ručička hodin urazí takovou či onakou vzdálenost v prostoru, pak čas uběhl tak a tak ‚dlouhý'"; ibid.), není zásadní rozdíl, činíme -li měřítkem času vyprávění počet stránek nebo počet minut. Píše doslova: "kdyby existovala stránková norma, měli bychom stejně užitečnou jednotku, jakou poskytuje normativní časomíra" (ibid.: ). Günther Müller ponechává tedy otevřeny přinejmenším tři způsoby, jak čas vyprávění nahlížet: čas, který vyžaduje mluvená či psaná prezentace příběhu; čas, který uplývá s jejich poslechem či čtením; "čas" (metonymicky) zpředmětněný v rozloze textu. Německý literární historik nemá na mysli čas empirický: jak dlouho skutečně trvá přečíst či vyprávět příběh, čas, který trvalo určitý text vytvořit, či přeneseně: tloušťku knihy. To je jeden z momentů, který byl převzat strukturální naratologií: čas vyprávění Nezvyšuje pro nás působivost této hry vědomí, že spolu s Kafkovou nepublikovanou prózou, náčrty, fragmenty, poznámkami a deníky měl Max Brod na autorovo přání zničit i jeho korespondenci? Jinými slovy: nejenže čteme dopisy určené cizím očím, ale dopisy, které měly zmizet z tváře světa vůbec. Müllerovu koncepci a její rozdílnost vůči pozdějšímu Genettovu modelu výborně komentuje Ricoeur ( : -), přičemž připomíná její přírodně -lozo cký podtext, tj. goethovskou morfologii rostlin a zvířat.

The article expounds the intellectual genealogy and development of Cultural Materialism and New H... more The article expounds the intellectual genealogy and development of Cultural Materialism and New Historicism; it also takes into account the genesis of Cultural Studies. The main point of departure and perspective for this inquiry is provided by the work and thought of Raymond Williams, in its constants and variables. The article further examines the relative positions of both critical currents, their fundamental concepts, correspondences and tensions and explores the meanings and perspectives of “materialism” in the criticism of literature and culture.

In this paper, the authors offer an overview and analysis of Roman O. Jakobson's concept of " art... more In this paper, the authors offer an overview and analysis of Roman O. Jakobson's concept of " artifice " and contextualize this concept within two critical traditions: functional aesthetics and sign theory. Within both traditions and through several examples the paper draws attention to certain weak points of this concept, namely the problematic assumption of the immanent character of parallelism as an artistic procedure as well as its unclear position within the Saussurean and Peircean semiological paradigms. Lastly, the concept of artifice is briefl y contextualized within what could be called inherent symmetricism of certain trends of 20th century literary theory.

In this study I am trying to address the connection between literature and ideology. Like Denys ... more In this study I am trying to address the connection between literature and ideology. Like Denys Turner, I define ideology as a preformative contradiction (contradiction between what you are doing in saying something, and what you are doing by means of saying it) which has become socialized and ritualized, i. e. materialized within social organization. In Paul de Man’s theory, the sphere continuously assimilating performative contradiction as such is rhetoric, the figurative potency of language intensified in literary discourse. In such view, it is ideological to contend that reference is something phenomenal, given to perception, rather than an effect of language. An analogous ideological tendency, however, can be seen in maintaing that the “inner” functioning of literary texts is different in principle to its “outer” functioning, i. e. axiomatical seperation of material-empirical dimension of text from the author-text-reader interaction, as it is attempted by Umberto Eco, who, however, continuously encounters difficulties in performing such analytical operation (wherein I see the inspirational sense of his theory). The relation between literary text and ideology is, in my view, de/constructive; on the one hand, literature continuously generates strategies of implicit persuasion, allowing to ritualize fundamental social performative contradictions, and thus to obliterate the difference between symbolic acts and acts by means of symbols. On the other hand, this very “productivity” of literature constitutes possibilities of intervention in ideological order. Reading Milan Kundera symptomatically, for instance, allows to register the contradiction between the fabulas of his novels and their anti-panoptical “ethics” and discoursive tactics of the supervisory narrator/career-author figure.

Lessons from Kafka

Kafka’s literary work, created in the time of the first expansion of telecommunications and in co... more Kafka’s literary work, created in the time of the first expansion of telecommunications and in conjunction with the emerging analogue media of the fin de siècle, represents various instances of communicational failure, misunderstanding, and malfunction of the various points and links of the information exchange. The idea suggests itself to transpose certain thematic elements of Kafka’s writing into the components of information theory. However, given that the terms of information theory are better tailored to dealing with the transmission of information rather than the processes of meaning interpretation, how should we understand such analogies? This paper approaches the question firstly by overviewing the development of the concept of noise in the contexts of information theory, Umberto Eco’s ‘open work’ poetics, Miroslav Červenka’s literary semiotics and, later, Michel Serres’ philosophy of science. It will be shown how the concept of noise is redefined from a physical phenomenon occurring on the channel, which is obviated by statistic calculations, to creative cultural interference which depends on the existence of linguistic and aesthetic codes. For instance, in Červenka’s theory the channel is conceived of as a structure of codes, and a code becomes a certain operational set of probabilities and expectations. In literary work, information grows in depth and the process of sense is exposed. In Serres’ philosophy, noise becomes the unavoidable foundation of communication and its paradoxical driving force.
In the face of the emerging noise of the telecommunications era and analogue sound and image reproduction apparatuses, Kafka’s strategy is the creation of what I interpret as the melancholic representation of this condition and an emphasis on the advantages of pen writing as a space of internality and silence. However, as the examples of The Trial and the later short story ‘Poseidon’ suggest, there seems to be an interconnection in the behaviour patterns of the physical systems as described by the contemporary thermodynamic (statistical mechanics) models and the communication systems defined by the impossibility to yield information: The exponential growth of signs with no possibility of verification as well as the interference of noise in the physical environment and communication result in the collapse of the boundary between the internal and the external environments. Kafka’s literary experiments (‘The Cares of the Family Man’ and ‘The Judgement’) can be understood as attempting to understand the positive possibilities of writing under the conditions of the desacralisation of sense (bureaucratization, the fall of the father figure) and of the expansion of noise environments.