Syllabus
Week 1
Course overview / Introduction to life and work of Bohumil Hrabal
Assigned reading:
Bohumil Hrabal: Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp
Week 2
From the inspirations: Jaroslav Hašek
Assigned reading:
Jaroslav Hašek: Behind the Lines & At the Front (from The Good Soldier Švejk)
Week 3
From the inspirations: Franz Kafka
Assigned reading:
Franz Kafka: Description of a Struggle & Metamorphosis
Recommended reading:
Bohumil Hrabal: Mr. Kafka and Other Tales
Week 4
From the inspirations: Ladislav Klíma
Assigned reading:
Ladislav Klíma: The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch: A Grotesque Romanetto
Week 5
Hrabal’s Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
Assigned reading:
Bohumil Hrabal: Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
Week 6
Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains
Assigned reading:
Bohumil Hrabal: Closely Watched Trains
Week 7
Hrabal’s I Served the King of England
Assigned reading:
Bohumil Hrabal: I Served the King of England
Week 8
From Hrabal’s short stories
Assigned reading:
Bohumil Hrabal: Rambling On: An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of the Gab
Week 9
Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude
Assigned reading:
Bohumil Hrabal: Too Loud a Solitude
Week 10
Hrabal’s so-called autobiographical trilogy
Assigned reading:
Bohumil Hrabal: In-House Weddings
Recommended readings:
Bohumil Hrabal: Vita Nuova: A Novel
Bohumil Hrabal: Gaps: A Novel
Week 11
From the tributes: Péter Esterházy
Assigned reading:
Péter Esterházy: The Book of Hrabal
Week 12
From the tributes: Paweł Huelle / Course conclusion
Assigned reading:
Paweł Huelle: Mercedes-Benz: from Letters to Hrabal
Annotation
This course focuses on the works written by Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997), who is estimated to be one of the greatest Czech authors, whose writings still inspire scholars and critics worldwide.
Intertextuality lies at the heart of Hrabal’s aesthetics. As he often stated himself when he talked about literature and his own reading experiences and preferences, one of the crucial constituents of his poetics is constant literary communication with other prosaists, poets, essayist, philosophers etc. Hrabal’s everchanging ability to combine various stories, references, excerpts or motifs, both from canonical “high” culture and from everyday life, with complex textual structures, integrating contrasts rather them eliminating them, makes his writing a distinctive example of the modern literary experiment.
Hrabal’s texts represent a universe of allusions, quotes, word plays, explicit or implicit literary dialogues, which open us to the historical context, but more crucially, to the complex intertextual network of literary influences, cultural exchange and communication in and beyond the Central European region. This creative process was also not somehow completed by Bohumil Hrabal: his writings also became a part of this network themselves, when several other authors paid their tributes to him, became inspired by his narrative style or even copied it.
We will examine selected works by Bohumil Hrabal and the other authors (see selected authors below in the weekly schedule), in an attempt to “decode” and describe some of those intertextual relationships and draw conclusions based on our analysis.