The Prague School - ABO700586

• Title: The Prague School
• Guaranteed by: Department of Czech and Comparative Literature (21-UCLK)
• Faculty: Faculty of Arts
• Actual: from 2023
• Semester: winter
• Points: 0
• E-Credits: 5
• Examination process: winter s.:
• Hours per week, examination: winter s.:0/2, Ex [HT]
• Capacity: unknown / unknown (unknown)
• Min. number of students: unlimited
• 4EU+: no
• Virtual mobility / capacity: yes / 30
• Key competences: data literacy
• State of the course: not taught
• Language: English, Czech
• Teaching methods: distance
• Note: course can be enrolled in outside the study plan; enabled for web enrollment
• Guarantor: Mgr. Eva Krásová, Ph.D.
• Class: A – Mezioborová nabídka VP: Literatura; A - Mezioborová nabídka VP: Lingvistika; Exchange - 09.2 General and Comparative Literature; Exchange - 09.3 Linguistics

Annotation

The course introduces students to the basic ideas of the Prague School by reading and discussing the most important and lesser-known texts, placing them in the context of contemporary thinking about language and literature, and highlighting the original moments as well as the derivative ideas that together form a specific form of structuralism.

Last update: Krásová Eva, Mgr., Ph.D. (02.07.2022)

Aim of the course

The aim of the course is to provide an insight into the basic thinking of the Prague School and to enable discussion of the ways in which it is usually described in the secondary literature. In doing so, students develop the ability to think critically , as well as an awareness of the historical contingency and givenness of certain concepts that contemporary linguistics and literary theory tend to take for granted.

Last update: Krásová Eva, Mgr., Ph.D. (02.07.2022)

Descriptors

the Prague school, Prague structuralism, history of linguistics, history of literary theory, poetics

Last update: Krásová Eva, Mgr., Ph.D. (02.07.2022)

Course completion requirements

Participation in discussion, 1 presentation, 1 research paper (15 standard pages maximum)

Last update: Krásová Eva, Mgr., Ph.D. (02.07.2022)

Literature

ČERMÁK, Petr – ČERMÁK, Jan – POETA, Claudio. Pražský lingvistický kroužek v dokumentech. Praha: Academia, 2012.

DOLEŽEL, Lubomír. Occidental poetics: tradition and progress. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990, ISBN 0-8032-1685-8.

HAVRÁNKOVÁ, Marie a Vladimír PETKEVIČ. Pražská škola v korespondenci: dopisy z let 1924-1989. Praha: Karolinum, 2014, ISBN 978-80-246-2742-7.

Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague [TCLP]:

TCLP 1: Mélanges linguistiques dédiés au premier Congres des philologues slaves. Prague: Jednota českých matematiků a fysiků, 1929.

TCLP 2: JAKOBSON, Roman. Remarques sur l'évolution phonologique du russe comparée a celle des autres langues slaves. Prague: Jednota českých matematiků a fysiků, 1929.

TCLP 4: Réunion phonologique internationale tenue a Prague (18-21/XII 1930). Prague: Jednota českých matematiků a fysiků, 1931.

TCLP 6: Études dédiées au quatrieme Congres de linguistes. Prague: [s.n.], 1936.

TCLP 7: TRUBECKOJ, Nikolaj Sergejevič. Grundzüge der Phonologie. Prague: Jednota československých matematiků a fysiků, 1939. Available in English: Principles of Phonology, transl. By Christiane A. M. Baltaxe, Los Angeles, Uiversity of California Press, 1969.

 

JAKOBSON, Roman a Krystyna POMORSKA. Dialogues. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press, 1988, ISBN 0-262-60016-1.

JAKOBSON, Roman. Selected writings. II, Word and Language. Hague: Mouton, 1971.

MUKAŘOVSKÝ, Jan. „The Word and Verbal Art“, ed. and transl. by John Burbank and Peter Steiner, New Haeven, Yale UP, 1977.   

MUKAŘOVSKÝ, Jan. Ecrits 1928-1946, Pier, John ; Vallance, Laurent ; Bílek, Petr A. ; Kubíček, Tomáš (dir.) (2018), Editions des archives contemporaines, France, 2018, ISBN : 9782813002488, 304p., doi : https://doi.org/10.17184/eac.9782813002488. Online: https://eac.ac/books/9782813002488.

SAUSSURE, Ferdinand de, Wade BASKIN, Charles BALLY, Albert SECHEHAYE a Albert RIEDLINGER. Course in general linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

SÉRIOT, Patrick a Amy JACOBS-COLAS. Structure and the whole: east, west and non-Darwinian biology in the origins of structural linguistics. Boston, Massachusetts: De Gruyter Mouton, 2014, ISBN 1-61451-827-0. DOI:10.1515/9781614515296. Available online in EBSCO database.

SLÁDEK, Ondřej „Mukařovský’s Structuralism and Semiotics“. Estetika : The Central European Journal of Aesthetics 53 (2016,) č. 2, s. 184–199.

SLÁDEK, Ondřej. The Metamorphoses of Prague School Structural Poetics, (Travaux linguistiques de Brno, 12), Munich, LINCOM, 2015. See also the review of SÉRIOT, Patrick in Histoire, épistémologie, langage, tome 39, fascicule 1, Université de Lyon, CNRS & ENS de Lyon,  2017, pp. 185-188. Online: www.persee.fr/doc/hel_0750-8069_2017_num_39_1_3593_t10_0185_0000_3.

STEINER, Peter (ed.). The Prague school: selected writings, 1929-1946. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982, ISBN 0-292-78043-5.

TOBIN, Yishai (ed.). The Prague School and its Legacy in linguistics, literature, semiotics, folklore, and the arts (a conference held in 1984 in Negev, Izrael). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1988, ISBN 90-272-1532-4. Available online in EBSCO database.

TOMAN, Jindřich. The magic of a common language: Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995, ISBN 9780262514569. Available online in EBSCO database.

VACHEK, Josef (ed.) A Prague School Reader in Linguistics. Bloomington: Indiana Univeristy Press, 1964, Online: https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/projects/prague-school-reader-in-linguistics.

VACHEK, Josef. Praguiana: some basic and less known aspects of the Prague linguistics school. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1983. 

VELTRUSKÝ, Jiří „Jan Mukařovský's Structural Poetics and Esthetics“; Poetics Today 2, č. 1b, s. 117–157, 1980.

WARREN, Austin a René WELLEK. Theory of literature. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin books, 1963.

 

Further readings:

Slovo a slovesnost (Archive). http://sas.ujc.cas.cz/archiv.php.

ČERVENKA, Miroslav 2016 „Základní kategorie pražského literárněvědného strukturalismu“; Slovo a smysl XXV, č. 13, s. 169–188.

GRYGAR, Mojmír. Trvání a proměny – Dvanáct kapitol o umění a dějinách, Praha: Torst, 2006.

HOSKOVEC, Tomáš. „Synchronie et diachronie au centre et à la périphérie : du foyer pragois de structuralisme fonctionnel“; Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 64 (2011), s. 49–72

MATĚJKA, Ladislav. Sound, sign and meaning: quinquagenary of the Prague Linguistic Circle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978.

PILSHCHIKOV, Igor. „The Prague School on a global scale: A coup d’œil from the east. Slovo a slovesnost“. PRAHA 1: Czech Lang Inst Czech Acad Sci, 2019, 80(3), 215-228. ISSN 0037-7031.

Sládek, O. (ed.): Český strukturalismus v diskusi. Brno: Host, 2014, ISBN 978-80-7294-969-4.

VOLEK, Emil. Metaestructuralismo: poética moderna, semiótica narrativa y filosofía de las ciencias sociales. Madrid: Fundamentos, 1985, ISBN 84-245-0430-5.

VOLEK, Emil Znak, funkce, hodnota. Praha – Litomyšl: KČL FF UK, 2005. 

Last update: Krásová Eva, Mgr., Ph.D. (04.07.2022)

Teaching methods

Reading of primary and secondary texts, discussion, individual presentation, research paper. 

Last update: Krásová Eva, Mgr., Ph.D. (04.07.2022)

Requirements to the exam

Participation in discussion, 1 presentation, 1 research paper (15 standard pages maximum)

Last update: Krásová Eva, Mgr., Ph.D. (04.07.2022)

Requisites for virtual mobility

Eva Krásová is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: The Prague School
Time: This is a recurring meeting Meet anytime

Join Zoom Meeting
https://cuni-cz.zoom.us/j/97164970813?pwd=OHB1UDFwSmNLWkdiOWZ5ZzAvRjk2UT09

Meeting ID: 971 6497 0813
Passcode: 554625

Last update: Krásová Eva, Mgr., Ph.D. (04.07.2022)

Syllabus

The Prague School as a topic of literary-theoretical and literary-historical research appears quite differently depending on whether the view is conducted from the "inside" of Czech scholarship or, on the contrary, from the outside from the perspective of global scholarship, whether in the Anglophone or Francophone tradition. In the latter case, the reception is influenced both by the composition and general availability of translated texts, and by the theoretical frameworks from which theorists writing about the Prague School draw. In the case of the Czech discourse on the Prague School, we are facing simplifications and tendencies marked by a certain inferiority complex, which forces theorists to emphasize unexpected moments, to schematize the doctrine into a well-organized doctrine, and, last but not least, to deviate from the Marxist and sociological dimensions of the Prague School.
Our course intends to try to go beyond these limitations and - within its own methodological framework, of course - to re-present the Prague School as a set of texts and performances that had a significant place in the story of the birth of structuralism and that present an interesting perspective on some of its central concepts, in particular:
- synchrony and diachrony,
- the question of the theoretical basis of the thesis of language as a system,
- the problem of the foundation of the humanities and the place of linguistics in it (the model of phonology)
- the topic of sentence as a linguistic unit
- the topic of style, stylistics and the notion of function-based differentiation of speech in the frame of the theory of functional languages
- the topic of poetic speech in relation to Russian formalism
- the specific "sociological" dimension that poetic speech takes on in Jan Mukařovský's poetry

The course will be divided into two thematic blocks, in the first we will focus on the postulates and theoretical foundations of the Prague School of linguistic thought, in the second we will focus on the problem of stylistics and poetic speech.
On an ongoing basis, we will orient students on the basic methodological approaches to describing the Prague School, as well as on the available (or unavailable) literature.

Last update: Krásová Eva, Mgr., Ph.D. (04.07.2022)

Entry requirements

Knowledge of the basic concepts of linguistics and literary theory.

Last update: Krásová Eva, Mgr., Ph.D. (04.07.2022)

Registration requirements

None. 

Last update: Krásová Eva, Mgr., Ph.D. (04.07.2022)