Minor tragedies: National identity as cultural translation in the Czech and Slovak novel.

Abstract

This dissertation examines prose works that perform a cultural translation between various languages and national identities in modern Czechoslovakia. The theoretical context is shaped by two texts: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's <italic>Kafka</italic>, which uses the deterritorialization of Prague-German writers to suggest the concept of minor literature, and Milan Kundera's essay The Tragedy of Central Europe. which described the fate of the small nations under Soviet hegemony. The interaction of Czech literature with Slovak, Jewish, and German cultures in the multiethnic republic shows that minor literatures are not just weaker imitations of major world literatures, but provide alternative perspectives on the ways that political forces shape national identity. The first chapter examines literature's historical role in nation-building, including the way that Czech culture moved from defining itself against German influence to taking a hegemonic role in the interwar Czechoslovak Republic. Chapter Two compares two works that exemplify the deterritorialization of Czech literature: Jaroslav Hasek's novel <italic>The Good Soldier Svejk </italic>, which challenged the politicization of language and territory despite its reputation as the quintessential Czech popular novel, and Ji i Langer's collection of Hasidic folklore, <italic>Nine Gates</italic>, which brings together Czech and Jewish culture, despite the historical tensions between them. Chapter Three explores the contradictions in Kundera's model of Central European identity and examines the ambiguous relationship of his novels, especially <italic> The Unbearable Lightness of Being</italic>, to his political writings on the region. The last chapters examine novelists who share Kundera's awareness of Central Europe's connection to and exclusion from European culture. In Libuse Monikova's <italic>The Facade</italic>, gender and the German language join her exile experience as sources of resistance to the Soviet oppression of Czechoslovakia. Finally, the Slovak writer Pavel Vilikovsky's <italic>Ever Green is</italic>...satirically illustrates how the ties between the Czech and Slovak languages have shaped the relationship between these nations. While a single Czechoslovak literature never existed, a more heterogeneous tradition of Czecho-Slovak literature can be seen in retrospect as an idealistic model which could not be politically sustained, but serves in retrospect as a cultural inspiration for multi-national existence.