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Borrowed Bodies. Popular literature as the inspiration source of the socialist realism

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2012

Abstract

This paper focuses on a specific segment of the semiotic universe of the body and corporality within the framework of Czechoslovak socialist realism during 1948-1956. It examines the question of how intimate body and sexuality are represented in the inconsistent system of socialist realism, and present a hypothesis that the emblematic reduction of body and corporality in poetry, fiction, and periodicals was fundamentally formed by naturalism and avantgarde on the one hand, and by the popular literature on the other, while this influence on the official line of socialist literature had been systematically denied.