TY - JOUR AU - Brzezińska, Anna Maria PY - 2018/06/27 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Atmosphere of societal anxiety and representations of the body: The image of man in surrealist works of Vítězslav Nezval in the 20th century interwar period in Bohemia JF - Journal of Education Culture and Society JA - JECS VL - 9 IS - 1 SE - LOCAL CULTURES AND SOCIETIES DO - 10.15503/jecs20181.181.189 UR - https://ogrodynauk.pl/index.php/jecs/article/view/10.15503jecs20181.181.189 SP - 181-189 AB - <p><strong>Aim: </strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">The interwar period in Czechoslovakia was a time of societal anxiety. The aim of this paper is to find the central themes of societal fear, as reflected in the surrealist works of Vítězslav Nezval, a czech poet. The analysis will be based primarily on the lyric poetry from the collections: </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Žena v množném čísle </span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">[</span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Woman in Plural</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">] (1936) and </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Absolutní hrobař</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;"> [</span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Absolute Gravedigger</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">] (1937).</span></p><p><strong>Methods</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">: The analysis is based on the Josef Vojdovík’s anthropo-phenomenological method of exploring the surrealist perceptions of the body, which is based on vertical and horizontal anthropological dimensions and phenomenological conceptions of fears. </span></p><p><strong>Results</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">: Surrealist poetry and other literary works contain images of the body that are changed by fear: deformations, metamorphoses, fragmentarisations, hybridisations, expressing the body as a collage, a mosaic, an amalgam, a phantom, a grotesque, an inlay, and as lifelessness. It undergoes multiple metamorphoses, not only within its own form, but also with regard to the categories of life and lifelessness.</span></p><p><strong>Conclusions</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">: The analysis leads to the conclusion, that V. Nezval’s works show a clear tendency to portray the body as an object which undergoes a metamorphosis. The body is balanced on the edge between living and dead, organic and inorganic, it is determined by time and space. It is often shown along the narrowing-widening relation, in stupor, petrification, reduced to a flat surface or miniaturised.</span></p> ER -