The Folk Is Dead, Long Live the People! On the New and the Old in Czech Marxist Poetism

Result code in IS VaVaI

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Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

The Folk Is Dead, Long Live the People! On the New and the Old in Czech Marxist Poetism

Original language description

In this paper I explore the avant-garde’s approach to popular culture and tradition, through the example of the Czech “poetist” movement, as conceptualized by critic and typographer Karel Teige, by poet Vítězslav Nezval, and by literary historian Bedřich Václavek. The Czech avant-garde, like most of its international counterparts, was convinced that institutions like art and literature had outlived their historical function, as had capitalist society and the bourgeois understanding of “the nation” and “the people.” But their work also illustrates how the wholesale rejection of these institutions and concepts overlay a more complex view of cultural legacy and the traditions of working masses. While the Czech poetist movement had no need for literature and believed that rural folklore was a thing of the past, it saw “poetry” as an essential aspect of human expression, which needed to be liberated from earlier constraints, becoming a new art of the people. Nezval demonstratively drew on “low” genres, writing gothic novels and imagining surrealist carnivals. Teige championed the circus and urban street culture as a “new folk art.” And Václavek traced the circulation of modern poetry and songs, making the case that new folklore was continually emerging as the culture of emerging classes which would replace the old. This complex interplay of new and old, I argue, offers a model for the prefiguration of a new world that still might survive the end of this one.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

O - Miscellaneous

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60401 - Arts, Art history

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2024

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů