Prague, Czech Republic

History of Czech Literature and Literary Theory

Dějiny české literatury a teorie literatury

Language: Czech Studies in Czech
University website: www.cuni.cz
Years of study: 4
History
History (from Greek ἱστορία, historia, meaning "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation") is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. Events occurring before written record are considered prehistory. It is an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of information about these events. Scholars who write about history are called historians.
Literature
Literature, most generically, is any body of written works. More restrictively, literature writing is considered to be an art form, or any single writing deemed to have artistic or intellectual value, often due to deploying language in ways that differ from ordinary usage.
Theory
A theory is a contemplative and rational type of abstract or generalizing thinking, or the results of such thinking. Depending on the context, the results might, for example, include generalized explanations of how nature works. The word has its roots in ancient Greek, but in modern use it has taken on several related meanings.
History
Every decade or so, the world is tested by a crisis so grave that it breaks the mould: one so horrific and inhumane that the response of politicians to it becomes emblematic of their generation —their moral leadership or cowardice, their resolution or incompetence. It is how history judges us.
Jo Cox, Don’t leave Syria to become a graveyard — this generation’s responsibility to the world (13 October 2015)
Theory
Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. “Philosophy is the microscope of thought.” The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.
Walter Pater (1873), The Renaissance, Conclusion
History
What really happens is that the author discards the human persona but replaces it by an ‘objective’ one; the authorial subject is as evident as ever, but it has become an objective subject … At the level of discourse objectivity, or the absence of any clues to the narrator, turns out to be particular form of fiction, where the historian tries to give the impression that the referent is speaking for itself.
Roland Barthes, ‘Le discours de l’histoire’ trans. as ‘Historical Discourse’ in M. Lane (ed.) Structuralism: A reader, London, Jonathan Cape, 1970, pp. 149–154.
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