That is why I am free to dream of Prague': A Critique on Authorial Nationality Discourse and Historical Grand Narrative in Laurent Binet's HHhH (original) (raw)
Related papers
Trauma & Memory, 2021
Literary and cultural representations of the Holocaust have changed considerably over the past decades. Whereas in the early postwar decades the emphasis was mainly on survivor accounts and the attempts to compile factually accurate history books on the events of the Shoah, there has, since then, been more engagement by the second and third generation, but also attempts to approach the Holocaust in fictional writing, a trend initially opposed by many Holocaust scholars. This article will, first of all, engage with the debates for and against Holocaust fiction and then offer a critical close reading of a recent example of Holocaust 'faction': Laurent Binet's 2012 (English translation) novel HHhH, a historical novel trying to come to terms with the responsibility it has towards 'real' historical events, and the relative freedoms it enjoys as a novel. It attempts to piece together the little known stories of the Czech and Slovak resistance fighters Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík who assassinated the
The nation’s “timeless mission”: Frontier Orientalism in Central European historical fiction
World Literature Studies, 2018
Andre Gingrich’s concept of frontier Orientalism focuses on the former Habsburg Empire, which has been overlooked by Orientalist and postcolonial studies. Through a comparison of Slovak, Polish, Hungarian, and Czech novelists, including Janko Kalinčiak, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Géza Gárdonyi, Jaroslav Durych, and Jozef Horák, this study shows how the genre of historical fiction evoked what Gingrich calls Central Europe’s “timeless mission” of defending the frontiers of the West from Eastern barbarians, as a metaphor for the repression of minority identities.
The Transnational in Literary Studies : potential and Limitations of a Concept, 2020
This chapter analyses two postmodern historical novels from Slovakia by Hungarian-minority authors as transnational texts: Nálunk, New Hontban (2001) by Lajos Grendel and Határeset (2008) by Péter Hunčík. Set in southern Slovakia, where state borders repeatedly shifted over the course of the twentieth century, both novels emphasise the hybridity of identities in Central Europe, where many ethnicities have been commingling in a relatively small space for centuries. By describing how nationalist discourses have led to ethnic hatred, colonial practices, and genocide, the texts point out the impossibility of writing a unified, chronological, progressive narrative of the nation and show the histories of European nations as deeply entangled in transnational webs of meaning. By retelling twentieth century European history from the point of view of a historically, geographically, and culturally marginal region, the novels rearrange European geopolitics and question the idea of 'centre' and 'margin' in the European context. The texts are paradigmatic of twenty-first-century literature from Slovakia that considers the idea of the nation-state in the Central European context to be deeply problematic.
The experience of exile through the eyes of Czech writers
2006
The author has further granted permission to Simon Fraser University to keep or make a digital copy for use in its circulating collection (currently available to the public at the "Institutional Repository" link of the SFU Library website <www.lib.sfu.ca> at: ~http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/handle/l892/112\~) and, without changing the content, to translate the thesidproject or extended essays, if technically possible, to any medium or format for the purpose of preservation of the digital work. The author has further agreed that permission for multiple copying of this work for scholarly purposes may be granted by either the author or the Dean of Graduate Studies. It is understood that copying or publication of this work for financial gain shall not be allowed without the author's written permission.
Based on a discursive analysis of poetry and fiction, this chapter analyses trends in Slovak communist and (post)-communist trauma narratives within the frame of postcolonial and trauma theory. Relying on intuitions by theorists such as Mbembe and Caruth, it suggests that assumptions of narrative psychology such as structured narratives and closure may not always be applicable to (post)-communist narratives in which issues of seduction, complicity, betrayal and irrational impulses complicate the meaning of collective traumas and the ways nations come to terms with them. Postmodern approaches that blur the line between history and fiction, including the outright rejection of the possibility of recovering history, and anti-realist modes such as the absurd and meta-fiction, seem to have a refreshing, anti-ideological effect upon post-communist historiography, de-centring history to recognize the nation as essentially hybrid and ambivalent.
The history of physical and socio-political violence in Central Europe, a region marred by Nazi occupation and Communist oppression, has always been a cocktail of confusion. Despite Milan Kundera’s controversial attempts to demarcate the boundaries of Central Europe, the region remains an ambiguous territory of which only shared history is multiculturalism, multilingualism and ever-shifting borders. A mélange of blatant betrayals and subtle propaganda which led to collective ethnic cleansing, culminated in pogroms and post-war repatriation policies, as well as personal brainwashing of prejudice gilded in the name of nationalism, Central European history is a distillation of dark humour and (e)strange(d) politics. In Emil Hakl’s Of Kids and Parents (O rodičích a dětech), published in 2002, translated into English by Marek Tomin and released as a film adaptation in 2008, social(ist) problem, as well as Kundera’s Czech myth, is presented “with a human face” and challenged by two famili...