Marek Nekula

Das Pantheon - verstanden als Gedachtnisort fur die Grossen eines Volkes - spielt bei der Konstruktion und symbolischen Konstituierung von Nation eine bedeutende Rolle. Das Buch untersucht die konkurrierenden und variierenden sprachnationalen und transethnischen Pantheons in den bohmischen Landern. Ruhmeshallen, Begrabnisstatten und Denkmaler werden zu literarischen Pantheons in Beziehung gesetzt. Funktion und Komposition von architektonischen Pantheons und Sammlungen von Biographien sind durchaus vergleichbar. Dies gilt auch fur die nationale Literaturgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, in der die grossen Schriftsteller kanonisiert wurden. Zentral ist dabei der Wiedergeburtsmythos der tschechischen Nation, die nach der Verewigung ihrer selbst im Pantheon strebt.

Franz Kafka is by far the Prague author most widely read and admired internationally. However, his reception in Czechoslovakia, launched by the Liblice conference in 1963, has been conflicted. While rescuing Kafka from years of censorship and neglect, Czech critics of the 1960s "overwrote" his German and Jewish literary and cultural contexts in order to focus on his Czech cultural connections. Seeking to rediscover Kafka's multiple backgrounds, in Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts Marek Nekula focuses on Kafka's Jewish social and literary networks in Prague, his German and Czech bilingualism, and his knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew. Kafka's bilingualism is discussed in the context of contemporary essentialist views of a writer's "organic" language and identity. Nekula also pays particular attention to Kafka's education, examining his studies of Czech language and literature as well as its role in his intellectual life. The book concludes by asking how Kafka "read" his urban environment, looking at the readings of Prague encoded in his fictional and non-fictional texts.

This study examines the two particle systems from a synchronic perspective, drawing upon extensive material to compare selected particles in German and Czech. Central to the approach is an elaborated concept of equivalence serving to pinpoint and highlight the functional, structural and relational similarities and differences between the two systems and between individual particles.