Prague Palimpsest

by Thomas, Alfred

• ISBN13: 9780226795409
• ISBN10: 0226795403
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewrittenfrom the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city's foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-gardeAlfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia. Considering a wide range of writers, including the city's most famous son, Franz Kafka,Prague Palimpsestreassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vitezslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who "wrote" Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Praguemore than any other major European cityhas haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
A Note on Translations, Quotations, and Names	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
Women on the Verge of History: Libu¿e and the Foundational Legend of Prague	p. 15
Deviant Monsters and Wayward Women: The Prague Ghetto and the Legend of the Golem	p. 43
The Castle Hill was Hidden: Franz Kafka and Czech Literature	p. 77
A Stranger in Prague: Writing and the Politics of Identity in Apollinaire, Nezval, and Camus	p. 109
Sailing to Bohemia: Utopia, Memory, and the Holocaust in Postwar Austrian and German Writing	p. 137
Epilogue: Postmodern Prague?	p. 168
Appendix: Translations of Poems about Prague	p. 177
Bibliography	p. 183
Index	p. 193
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