This collection of essays offers crucial and luminous insights into one of the best-known Czech authors, Milan Kundera, including his lesser known works.
With essays that focus on Kundera's poetry and plays, his last four novels written in French, and his nonfiction writings on the novelistic form and translation, Milan Kundera Known and Unknown explores the complex and productive career of this globally recognized author. The approach begins by examining Kundera's distinctive literary style, and then how his voice radiated outward from the small communist country of Czechoslovakia to the world.
Starting as a poet and playwright, Kundera transcended the Czech literary scene and rose to global prominence with his novelistic style of variations, paradoxes, humor, and clairvoyance into human relationships mixed with political tensions. His multi-dimensional existential topics introduced complex novelistic characters that have reached a large audience and remain evocative. Kundera also critically commented on creative works – his own and of others – thus contributing a unique approach to a specific aesthetic ideal and within the masterworks of world-renowned authors.
Chapters on Kundera's aesthetics and form, his philosophical leanings, his relationship to the burgeoning concept of “world literature,” and translations of his writings offer new perspectives on his life's work. These insights shed light on Kundera's understudied works, such as his early poetry and his recent French novels, making connections between his early and later writing, and cementing his literary legacy for English-language audiences.
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This collection of essays offers crucial and luminous insights into one of the best-known Czech authors, Milan Kundera, including his lesser known works.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Milan Kunderas Multidimensionality and Interdisciplinarity
Karen von Kunes, Yale University, USA
Part I. Kundera Known in World Literature: Philosophical Reflections in His
Writings
1. Remembering Milan Kundera and the Laughing God
Jason M. Wirth, University of Seattle, USA
2. An International Socialist Avant-Garde, or the Western Canon: Kunderas
Early Reflections on World Literature
Mary Orsak, University of Oxford, UK
3. The Unbearable Lightness of the Self: An Essay in Seven Parts on Kunderas
Immortality
Jason M. Wirth, University of Seattle, USA
Part II. Kundera Known Through Translation: Life Struggle with Retranslating
4. Kunderas Sophisticated, Euphonic, and Rhythmic Style in Translation,
Language, and Reading
Michelle Woods, SUNY New Paltz, USA
5. Milan Kunderas Words: Variations on a Personal Lexicon
Charles Sabatos, Yeditepe University, Turkey
6. Lítost as "Category of Existence" in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
David S. Danaher, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
7. Milan Kundera and the Paradox of Translation
Harriet Hulme, University College Dublin, Ireland
Part III. Kundera Known : Exophonic Writer, French Essayist, and Novelist
8. Art is Elsewhere: The Festival of Insignificance as Milan Kunderas
Farewell to Aesthetics
Zekiye Antakyalioglu, Istanbul Aydin University, Turkey
9. The Rhizome Unifying Milan Kunderas French Novels: Migration, Identity,
Multilingualism
Karen von Kunes, Yale University, USA
10. Ontology and Universalism: The (Mis-)Appropriations of Milan Kundera in
France and in the Czech Republic
Muriel Blaive, University of Graz, Austria
Part IV. Kundera Unknown: His Ideological Poetry, His Drama, and TV Plays
11. Milan Kundera: The Lyrical Poet
Jan Culík, University of Glasgow, UK
12. Poems of Bitter Loves: The Early Poetry of Milan Kundera
Michal Bauer, University of South Bohemia in Ceské Budejovice, Czechia,
translated from Czech by Ashley Davies, edited and adapted to English by
Karen von Kunes
13. Historiography of Kunderas Four Dramatic Plays
Lenka Jungmannová, Institute for Czech Literature at the Prague Academy of
Sciences, Czechia, translated from Czech by Peter Gaffney
14. "The Theater of the Absurd" in Milan Kundera's Two Plays
Jan Culík, University of Glasgow, UK, and Karen von Kunes, Yale University,
USA
Afterword Milan Kunderas Warning of Upcoming Tragedy: The Reinvention of
Central Europe
Jacques Rupnik, Centre dEtudes et de Recherches Internationales-CERI,
France, translated from French by Constance Sherak
Notes on Contributors
Index
Karen von Kunes is Assistant Professor teaching Czech and Slovak literature, film, and Czech language in the Department of Slavic & East European Languages & Cultures at the University of Toronto, Canada. Previously, she taught at Yale University, Harvard University, and the University of Texas, among other institutions. In addition to her many awards and publications, von Kunes belongs to the Circle of Scholars at Salve Regina University and is a Jonathan Edwards College Fellow at Yale University. Her most recent publications include Milan Kunderas Fiction: A Critical Approach to Existential Betrayals (2019) and Czech: An Essential Grammar (2021, co-authored).
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