This dissertation examines the theme of travel in the work of Karel Čapek (1890-1938), both in his travelogues and fiction. Instead of assuming travel as a conventional departure to another destination, journey and return home, Čapek experimented with the topic, popular in interwar literatures and arts, as an example of the avant-garde interconnectedness between different genres and arts. Čapek used three approaches to express his experiences of traveling. First, he founded his own aesthetics of the so called “marginal forms” or “low-brow genres” which he simultaneously interpolated in his prose. Their use, which greatly changes the perspective on travel writing, is visible in comparison between Čapek’s and previous travelogues (chapter 1). Secondly, he introduced skaz as stylized spoken language to Czech literature, and changed the traditional roles of the narrator and his addressees in travelogues (chapter 2). Thirdly, he used visual elements of language, combined verbal and visual arts (illustrations and drawings) in the narrative (chapter 3). Finally, all these elements he interpolated to his prose (chapter 4) through the intertextual links with travelogues. On the example of the theme of travel in Karel Čapek’s work, my dissertation revisits some current definitions of the historical avant-garde. It shows that the recent theories, predominantly developed on the examples from Western European and Russian arts, cannot be fully applied to local artistic movements. First, it shows that the notion of the avant-garde cannot be just confined to the writers who called themselves “avant-garde” (such as Karel Teige or Vladislav Vančura). Instead, it should be also expanded to other writers, such as Karel Čapek, marginal to the avant-garde mainstream. Second, the analysis of the theme of travel in Karel Čapek’s opus shows that the Czech avant-garde was not destructive towards its literary heritage. Instead, it offered an alternative reading of tradition through artistic experiments. In extension, it also provided a new understanding of the cultural and literary identity.

This dissertation examines the theme of travel in the work of Karel Čapek (1890-1938), both in his travelogues and fiction. Instead of assuming travel as a conventional departure to another destination, journey and return home, Čapek experimented with the topic, popular in interwar literatures and arts, as an example of the avant-garde interconnectedness between different genres and arts. Čapek used three approaches to express his experiences of traveling. First, he founded his own aesthetics of the so called “marginal forms” or “low-brow genres” which he simultaneously interpolated in his prose. Their use, which greatly changes the perspective on travel writing, is visible in comparison between Čapek’s and previous travelogues (chapter 1). Secondly, he introduced skaz as stylized spoken language to Czech literature, and changed the traditional roles of the narrator and his addressees in travelogues (chapter 2). Thirdly, he used visual elements of language, combined verbal and visual arts (illustrations and drawings) in the narrative (chapter 3). Finally, all these elements he interpolated to his prose (chapter 4) through the intertextual links with travelogues. On the example of the theme of travel in Karel Čapek’s work, my dissertation revisits some current definitions of the historical avant-garde. It shows that the recent theories, predominantly developed on the examples from Western European and Russian arts, cannot be fully applied to local artistic movements. First, it shows that the notion of the avant-garde cannot be just confined to the writers who called themselves “avant-garde” (such as Karel Teige or Vladislav Vančura). Instead, it should be also expanded to other writers, such as Karel Čapek, marginal to the avant-garde mainstream. Second, the analysis of the theme of travel in Karel Čapek’s opus shows that the Czech avant-garde was not destructive towards its literary heritage. Instead, it offered an alternative reading of tradition through artistic experiments. In extension, it also provided a new understanding of the cultural and literary identity.

This study considers the ontological value of metaphor as a site of ceaseless interaction among multiple (gendered) subjects, drawing on the theoretical work of Max Black, Victor Turner, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson. Its focus is on the particular function of metaphor, locally and internationally, in three of the “new wars” of the twentieth century. The first chapter examines how the bridge metaphor, undergirded by cultural discourses on Mostar’s Old Bridge and Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina, shaped knowledge of gendered experiences in the Bosnian War. The second chapter historicizes the cockroach metaphor, which features in many representations of the Rwandan Genocide, and identifies how “the cockroach” is gendered by metaleptic reference to ubuhake, or pastoral clientship—which gained metaphoric significance through populist movements in the 1950s, when Saverio Naigiziki published The Optimist. The third chapter explores depictions of female civilians, combatants, and suicide-bombers as “prisoners,” considering this metaphor’s gendered variations from Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus” to discourses on the Chechen Wars. These three metaphors are of central importance to the production of knowledge about how and in what ways post-cold-war conflicts are gendered. Frequently, the international community objectifies “distant conflicts” through the same metaphors that, for local agents, articulate political self-identifications and enact gendered violence. Locally-initiated metaphors, thusly circulating among multiple discourses, produce interactive sites of semantic investment and imaginary exchange. Global and regional representations in metaphor of the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars enter into common if asymmetrical networks of geopolitical and temporal interactions structured in part by human rights norms in the 1990s. By tracing the historical, cultural, and modal transformations of bridge, cockroach, and prisoner metaphors, this study investigates how fiction, poetry, journalism, memoir, testimony, film, and performance gender knowledge of the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars.

The 1950s and 1960s in Czechoslovakia witnessed a fundamental shift in the dramatic and theatrical realms. Following the Communist takeover of 1948, Soviet-inspired Socialist Realism became the official aesthetic of the Czech lands, displacing the avant-garde trends that had dominated the pre-war era. This normative aesthetic program demanded a party-minded ideological perspective (partiinost) and a certain level of accessibility to the masses (narodnost). After the death of Stalin, as the political situation began to thaw, various theatre practitioners began to undermine these Socialist Realist demands, widening the literary horizons by experimenting with a variety of trends, and ultimately sowing the seeds that would lead to the flowering of the Czech theatre of the 1960s. This thesis investigates the ways in which the Socialist Realist model for dramatic and theatrical expression was subverted on the experimental stages of Prague in the late 1950s and 1960s. Specifically, it analyzes the changing role of ideology, dramatic and theatrical space, and objects during this period. By the 1960s, the earnest, socialist ideology that pervaded Socialist Realism in its purported message to the audience had become a stale aesthetic model. In 1963, Václav Havel’s Zahradní slavnost couches this ideology in an absurd dramatic world, subverting and satirizing the didactic nature of Socialist Realism while simultaneously drawing from the Czech avant-garde and foreign trends like the so-called Theatre of the Absurd. Prague’s experimental theatre movement in the 1950s and 1960s, though certainly present on large stages like the National Theatre, primarily sprang from the city’s small stages. Both Jiří Suchý and Jiří Šlitr’s Semafor Theatre and Otomar Krejča’s Theatre Beyond the Gate managed highly innovative productions despite limited stage space. This was made possible, in part, due to their remarkable use of the off-stage and imaginary action spaces. In his article “Man and Object in the Theatre,” Jiří Veltruský notes that human actors on stage operate between two poles: highly spontaneous and highly determined actions. Socialist Realism, which offered its audience models of behaviour for their lives outside the theatre, reduced characters to types, limiting their perceived spontaneity, as they exist primarily to fulfill necessary narrative functions (i.e., the positive hero). In a sense, human beings are objectified. In his adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi, director Jan Grossman takes this to the extreme. By presenting the actions of his actors as highly determined, he reduces the human figure to a manipulated object. When Ubu oversees the annihilation of these beings, Grossman both parodies the Socialist Realist approach to characterization and offers a stunningly subversive rebuke of the Czech political culture. In this work I show how the innovative spirit of Czech theatre and drama of the 1960s represented an era of shifting aesthetic norms, which reacted to the strict, normative Socialist Realist trend of the 1950s, borrowed from numerous foreign and domestic trends both past and present, and developed unique techniques of their own in order to create impactful works on the stage and on the page.

The 1950s and 1960s in Czechoslovakia witnessed a fundamental shift in the dramatic and theatrical realms. Following the Communist takeover of 1948, Soviet-inspired Socialist Realism became the official aesthetic of the Czech lands, displacing the avant-garde trends that had dominated the pre-war era. This normative aesthetic program demanded a party-minded ideological perspective (partiinost) and a certain level of accessibility to the masses (narodnost). After the death of Stalin, as the political situation began to thaw, various theatre practitioners began to undermine these Socialist Realist demands, widening the literary horizons by experimenting with a variety of trends, and ultimately sowing the seeds that would lead to the flowering of the Czech theatre of the 1960s. This thesis investigates the ways in which the Socialist Realist model for dramatic and theatrical expression was subverted on the experimental stages of Prague in the late 1950s and 1960s. Specifically, it analyzes the changing role of ideology, dramatic and theatrical space, and objects during this period. By the 1960s, the earnest, socialist ideology that pervaded Socialist Realism in its purported message to the audience had become a stale aesthetic model. In 1963, Václav Havel’s Zahradní slavnost couches this ideology in an absurd dramatic world, subverting and satirizing the didactic nature of Socialist Realism while simultaneously drawing from the Czech avant-garde and foreign trends like the so-called Theatre of the Absurd. Prague’s experimental theatre movement in the 1950s and 1960s, though certainly present on large stages like the National Theatre, primarily sprang from the city’s small stages. Both Jiří Suchý and Jiří Šlitr’s Semafor Theatre and Otomar Krejča’s Theatre Beyond the Gate managed highly innovative productions despite limited stage space. This was made possible, in part, due to their remarkable use of the off-stage and imaginary action spaces. In his article “Man and Object in the Theatre,” Jiří Veltruský notes that human actors on stage operate between two poles: highly spontaneous and highly determined actions. Socialist Realism, which offered its audience models of behaviour for their lives outside the theatre, reduced characters to types, limiting their perceived spontaneity, as they exist primarily to fulfill necessary narrative functions (i.e., the positive hero). In a sense, human beings are objectified. In his adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi, director Jan Grossman takes this to the extreme. By presenting the actions of his actors as highly determined, he reduces the human figure to a manipulated object. When Ubu oversees the annihilation of these beings, Grossman both parodies the Socialist Realist approach to characterization and offers a stunningly subversive rebuke of the Czech political culture. In this work I show how the innovative spirit of Czech theatre and drama of the 1960s represented an era of shifting aesthetic norms, which reacted to the strict, normative Socialist Realist trend of the 1950s, borrowed from numerous foreign and domestic trends both past and present, and developed unique techniques of their own in order to create impactful works on the stage and on the page.

This study considers the ontological value of metaphor as a site of ceaseless interaction among multiple (gendered) subjects, drawing on the theoretical work of Max Black, Victor Turner, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson. Its focus is on the particular function of metaphor, locally and internationally, in three of the “new wars” of the twentieth century. The first chapter examines how the bridge metaphor, undergirded by cultural discourses on Mostar’s Old Bridge and Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina, shaped knowledge of gendered experiences in the Bosnian War. The second chapter historicizes the cockroach metaphor, which features in many representations of the Rwandan Genocide, and identifies how “the cockroach” is gendered by metaleptic reference to ubuhake, or pastoral clientship—which gained metaphoric significance through populist movements in the 1950s, when Saverio Naigiziki published The Optimist. The third chapter explores depictions of female civilians, combatants, and suicide-bombers as “prisoners,” considering this metaphor’s gendered variations from Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus” to discourses on the Chechen Wars. These three metaphors are of central importance to the production of knowledge about how and in what ways post-cold-war conflicts are gendered. Frequently, the international community objectifies “distant conflicts” through the same metaphors that, for local agents, articulate political self-identifications and enact gendered violence. Locally-initiated metaphors, thusly circulating among multiple discourses, produce interactive sites of semantic investment and imaginary exchange. Global and regional representations in metaphor of the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars enter into common if asymmetrical networks of geopolitical and temporal interactions structured in part by human rights norms in the 1990s. By tracing the historical, cultural, and modal transformations of bridge, cockroach, and prisoner metaphors, this study investigates how fiction, poetry, journalism, memoir, testimony, film, and performance gender knowledge of the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars.