Abstract Virginia Woolf and Karel Čapek produced direct responses to the British Empire Exhibition in the forms of – in Woolf's case – a scathing essay entitled 'Thunder at Wembley' and – in Čapek's case – a (P)OstModernist travelogue later published as part of 'Letters from England' translated into English in 1925 and banned by the Nazis as well as the Communists. This research paper juxtaposes modernity in Central Europe with its 'Other' – that in Western Europe – by exploring Woolf and Čapek's durée réelle between 1910 and 1924. It offers an analysis of Karel Čapek's (P)OstModern legacies, placing Prague right on the modernist centre stage. The socio-political contribution of Central European regional modernism in Čapek's work is increasingly vital to the contemporary Europe of Brexit and refugee and migrant crises, and beyond.
Jáchym Topol's The Devil's Workshop [Chladnou zemí] is a dystopian novel depicting the legacies of Nazi and Communist oppression on Czech and Belarusian histories amidst the boom of Holocaust tourism industry. I propose in this paper that the embalmed bodies exhibited at the fictional Devil's Workshop Museum can be regarded as extreme and horrendous manifestation of the somatechnics of embalmment, which nevertheless deconstructs the fundamental principles of embalming. Embalming is an ambivalent act which vacillates between life and death. It renders the body a 'twilight zone' of power negotiation and semantic contestation. When Lenin was alive, for instance, embalming was part of the Bolshevik's 'god-building' campaign meant to expose the incorruptibility of Orthodox saints as fraud. Since the Bolsheviks wished to secularise the new socialist utopian state, embalming was instrumental to their mission to glorify the ordinary man. Ironically, however, the outcome was that the communist leaders became sanctified through the very religious and ritualistic paradigm the Bolsheviks attempted to challenge and uproot. This deconstructive doubleness can also be seen in the mannequin-like bodies transformed by Topol's fiction into what I term 'hypercorposurreality', the body which transcends the body, the sign of which signified transcends its authentic signification and evokes in readers what Merleau-Ponty calls 'hyper-reflection', the kind of reflection which criticises the kind of reflection which overlooks the limitations of idealisation. Since the body is situated in a particular political sphere as well as geographical location and since the body's inscribed and allocated geopolitical significance is put to the fore by violence, one's understanding of the body has to be formulated and articulated through an analysis of geocorpographies—the ways in which geography and the corporeal experience are imbricated and intertwined.
Censorship has often been regarded as the archenemy of artists, thinkers and writers. But has this always been the case? This research paper proposes that censorship is not a total evil or adversarial force which thwarts and hinders twentieth-century writers, particularly those who were part of the artistic, aesthetic, philosophical and intellectual movement known as Modernism. Though the word "censor" originally means a Roman official who, in the past, had a duty to monitor access to writing, the agents of censorship – particularly those in the modern times – are not in every case overt and easy to identify. Though Modernist writers openly condemn censorship, many of them nevertheless take on the role of censors who not only condone but also undergo self--censorship or censorship of others. In many cases in Modernist literature, readership and literary production, the binary opposition of victim and victimiser, as well as of censored and censor, is questioned and challenged. This research paper offers an analysis of the ways in which Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) and Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) lived and wrote by negotiating with many forms of censorship ranging from state censorship, social censorship, political censorship, moral censorship to self-censorship. It is a study of the ways in which these writers problematise and render ambiguity to the seemingly clear-cut and mutually exclusive division between the oppressive censor and the oppressed writer. The selected writers not only criticise and compromise with censorship, but also thematise and translate it into their works. ; Censorship has often been regarded as the archenemy of artists, thinkers and writers. But has this always been the case? This research paper proposes that censorship is not a total evil or adversarial force which thwarts and hinders twentieth-century writers, particularly those who were part of the artistic, aesthetic, philosophical and intellectual movement known as Modernism. Though the word "censor" originally means a Roman official who, in the past, had a duty to monitor access to writing, the agents of censorship – particularly those in the modern times – are not in every case overt and easy to identify. Though Modernist writers openly condemn censorship, many of them nevertheless take on the role of censors who not only condone but also undergo self--censorship or censorship of others. In many cases in Modernist literature, readership and literary production, the binary opposition of victim and victimiser, as well as of censored and censor, is questioned and challenged. This research paper offers an analysis of the ways in which Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) and Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) lived and wrote by negotiating with many forms of censorship ranging from state censorship, social censorship, political censorship, moral censorship to self-censorship. It is a study of the ways in which these writers problematise and render ambiguity to the seemingly clear-cut and mutually exclusive division between the oppressive censor and the oppressed writer. The selected writers not only criticise and compromise with censorship, but also thematise and translate it into their works.
