Aesthetics in Central Europe: New Publications

1. POLAND Wioletta Kazimierska-Jerzyk. Kamp, glamur, vintage: Współczes ne kategorie estetyczne. Łódź: Wydawnictwo UŁ, 2018, 226 pp. ISBN 978-83-8088-828-9 In the title of her book ‘Camp, Glamour, Vintage: Contemporary Aesthetic Categories’, Wioletta Kazimierska-Jerzyk sets out the three areas in which she believes the leading aesthetic preferences of today’s culture lie. Contemporary aesthetics as a philosophical discipline should consider this trend and include these categories in its reflections, discussing their meanings and scope. These are not just simply styles, the author argues; they offer a universal spectrum of experiences, ethical, cognitive, and political, as well as aesthetic. They offer aesthetic values not so much competing with beauty and other traditional aesthetic values but rather in parallel with them. The author also examines their relation to kitsch. Camp, glamour, and vintage are demonstrated as complex pluralistic aesthetics categories pervading everyday life. Dorota Koczanowicz. Pozycja smaku: Jedzenie w granicach sztuki. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2018, 358 pp. ISBN 978-83-658-3224 The new book by Dorota Koczanowicz, entitled ‘The Position of Taste: Food in Art’, is an interesting approach to the topic of food in art or food aesthetics. After providing an overview of food studies, Kocza - nowicz devotes the second part of her book to a broad and thorough interpretation of the category of taste in philosophy, its cultural entanglements, and its relationship to authenticity. The main ques - tion behind her investigations, which she presents in the following parts of her book, is whether eating can be art. In her search for answers, she draws on a rich range of cultural practices and artistic endeavours (including F. T. Marinetti, Marina Abramović and Ulay, Martha Rosler, Julita Wójcik, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Anna Królikiewicz, Marije Vogelzang, and especially Daniel Spoerri and Rirkrit Tiravanija). Her reflections are grounded in pragmatist aesthetics and somaesthetics. Grażyna Krupińska. Sztuka staje się życiem a życie sztuką: Poglądy estetyczne Lou Andreas-Salomé w przestrzeni kulturowej końca XIX i początku XX wieku. Kraków: Universitas, 2018, 228 pp. ISBN 97883-242-3194-2 ‘Art Becomes Life and Life Becomes Art: The Aesthetic Theory of Lou Andreas-Salomé in the Context of the Culture of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’ is the first comprehensive Polish mo - nograph on the aesthetic theory of Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937), a writer and philosopher born in Saint Petersburg and writing in German. She was a prominent figure in German cultural life, inspired by Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud. She wrote novels and critical and philosophical essays. Her aesthetic theory was focused on the artist and the artistic creative process. These ideas are grounded in Lebensphilosophie, emphasizing the inextricable interconnection of art and life. Teresa Pękala, ed. Dyskursy sztuki: Dyskursy o sztuce. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 2018, 636 pp. ISBN 978-83-227-9091-5 The volume ‘Discourses of Art: Discourses on Art’, edited by Teresa Pękala, assembles the voices of various theorists and artists in a mosaic panorama of approaches to the relationship between discourses and the arts. The authors discuss the possibility, meanings, scope, and ways of theorizing about art in the humanities and museum work. The volume includes a wide range of reflections on the ideas of leading philosophers and critical analyses of approaches to the ontology of art. The second thread of the book is focused on the strategies by which art produces its own discourses, especially Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 139–46 139 AESTHETICS IN CENTRAL EUROPE NEW PUBLICATIONS Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 139 new artistic forms of expression, such as the new media arts, design, BioArt, and also innovative photography and theatre. Monika Bokiniec 2. SLOVAKIA Andrej Démuth, ed. The Cognitive Aspects of Aesthetic Experience – Introduction. Bratislava: VEDA, 2017, 171 pp. ISBN 978-80-2241576-7 The articles in this collection were written by psychologists and philosophers associated mostly with the Center for Cognitive Studies at the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, Trnava University. As the title suggests, this collection is intended as an initial publication in a larger project. The articles analytically probe classic questions of aesthetics, such as beauty, the emotions, and knowledge. They reflect on current research in cognitive studies by authors like Semir Zeki and Peter Gärdenfors. The particular questions involve the philosophy of music, the aesthetics of life, and even the aesthetics of mathematics. The more psychologically oriented essays investigate questions of beauty and aesthetic experience on the basis of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. Vladislava Fekete and Zuzana Uličianska, eds. Súčasná dráma aper - formatívny priestor: od textu k imerznému divadlu / Contemporary Drama and Performative Space: From Playwriting to Immersive Theatre. Bratislava: Divadelný ústav, 2018, 154 pp. ISBN 978-808190-035-8 This is a bilingual Slovak-English collection of papers presented at an international conference of the same name, which was held in Bratislava in May 2017. It includes papers by Slovak, Romanian, British, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and Canadian theatre theorists and playwrights, focusing on ‘immersive theatre’ – the contemporary form of theatre which invites direct participation by the viewer and where the length, direction, and outcome of the performance is determined by the viewers’ activity or interaction. The papers include ones exploring the theoretical foundations of immersive theatre, especially the notion of the theatre space and its boundaries, as well as papers about particular performances. Július Fujak. Emanácie hudobnej semiosféry. Nitra: Univerzita Konštantína Filozofa, 2018, 182 pp. ISBN 978-80-558-1281-6 ‘Emanations of Musical Semiosphere’ is a collection of essays by the music theorist, composer, and musician Július Fujak. The essays are arranged in three sets: the first three essays investigate and develop the semiotic models of music provided by philosophers František Miko, Peter Faltin, and Eero Tarasti. The topics they cover are the nature of the musical sign, musical syntax, and the peculiarly untranslatable nature of musical communication as such. The next three essays are particular case studies, the first of which focuses on the notion of transgression in avant-garde musical works (by Helmust Oehring, Ivan Acher, and Ladislav Burlas) and works of rock music (Fujak’s own bands Teória odrazu and Otras). The other two essays are concerned with works by the avant-garde composer Milan Adamčiak and the keyboardist Marián Varga. The final set of essays includes less academic, more personal essays about twenty-first-century avant-garde music, rock, intertextual communication between music and other art forms, and the local art environment in Nitra. These essays reflect Fujak’s own experiences as a teacher, musician, and composer. Michaela Pašteková and Marek Debnár, eds. Pragmatické dimenzie umenia a estetiky. Bratislava: Slovenská asociácia pre estetiku, 2018, 304 pp. ISBN 978-80-972624-1-9 The collection of essays, ‘Pragmatic Dimensions of Art and Aesthetics’, is a result of a conference of the same name, held in Bratislava in September 2017. The main goal of the volume is to revitalize and refine the discussions about ‘pragmatism’, a term that is currently often used too broadly or otherwise misused. The introduction traces pragmatism back to John Dewey; the individual articles then engage pragmatism with various other philosophical approaches, such as semiotics, reception theory, linguistics, hermeneutics, feminism, and phenomenology. The book has three parts, the first of which is New Publications 140 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 140 primarily concerned with pragmatic aesthetics, its theoretical foundations, its continuing relevance, and its relationship to other aesthetic theories. The second part broadens the theoretical reach to include other aesthetic approaches, focusing on the works of Adorno and Bergson and on analytic aesthetics. The third part includes articles where such theoretical foundations are applied in interpreting particular works, genres, or types of art. The topics here include Slovak film, digital aesthetics, and the aesthetics of contemporary architecture. Zora Rusinová and Ján Kralovič, eds. Serialita a repetícia. Bratislava: Vysoká škola výtvarných umení, 2017, 252 pp. ISBN 978-80-8189-015-4 The full title of this collection is ‘Seriality and Repetition as Creative Principles of the Integrated Work of Art’. The collection comprises papers presented at an international conference held in Bratislava in May 2017. The fourteen contributions are by Czech and Slovak art theorists and philosophers. As the title states, these essays investigate the principles of seriality and repetition in multiple art forms, from literature to the plastic arts, architecture, film, photography, theatre, and music. Some of them touch upon the philosophical thinking about seriality and repetition in the works of thinkers such as Bergson, Eco, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin, and the theoretical writings of artists themselves – such as the architect Peter Eisenman and the composers Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis – are also analysed in great detail. The essays are accompanied by many helpful illustrations, either reproducing the analysed works of visual art or providing glimpses into music scores. Oľga Sisáková. Projekty estetizácie existencie v súčasnej filozofii a kultúre. Prešov: Filozofická fakulta Prešovskej univerzity, 2017, 161 pp. ISBN 978-80-555-1903-6 In the monograph ‘The Projects of the Aestheticization of Existence in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture’ the author analyses the notion of the ‘aestheticization of existence’ as a response to multiple processes emerging in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the decline of metaphysics, emerging scepticism, mistrust of universally valid ethical values, and secularization. In this situation, aesthetics may provide one with an alternative framing of political freedom, involving questions of autonomy, subjectivity, power, and care of the self. The author uses Foucault’s notion of the ‘aesthetics of existence’ as a starting point, but then sets about developing it more broadly as a basic model for contemporary political and ethical living. She then analyses the processes of such aestheticization in the works of Georg Simmel, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Pierre Bourdieu. Finally, she develops a general model of this aestheticization and considers whether it is to be understood as a special ‘art of living’, enhancement, compensation, or defensive strategy, as well as assessing the possible success of such strategies when living in contemporary society. Jana Sošková. Estetika a filozofia umenia Svätopluka Štúra. Prešov: Filozofická fakulta Prešovskej univerzity, 2017, 302 pp. ISBN 978-80-555-1878-7 This book, simply called ‘The Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art of Svätopluk Štúr’, is a thorough study of the aesthetic thinking of one of the most important Slovak philosophers of the twentieth century. The author defines Štúr’s approach as ‘a certain form of intuitivist aesthetics’, influenced by Immanuel Kant, Benedetto Croce, Josef Bartoš, F. X. Šalda, and Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Štúr’s focus here is on the individual’s particular artistic experience and respective processes of perception, imagination, recognition, and evaluation. After the introductory chapter, the book proceeds with three chapters focused on Štúr’s thinking about the plastic arts, theatre, and music. The fifth, and final, chapter then analyses Štúr’s intuitivist aesthetics in greater detail. He considered intuitivism to be the proper approach to aesthetics and considered art to be an enrichment of life. He did not, however, consider the intuitivist approach to be prone to irrationalism, nor did he wish to exaggerate art’s function in life. This chapter thus presents Štúr in his critical engagements as well, criticizing, for example, Bergson for what he perceived as the irrational features of his philosophy and Tolstoy for overrating art’s role in life. The book is provided with a complete bibliography of Štúr’s books and articles. New Publications Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 141 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 141 Marcus Zagorski. Kapitoly z estetiky seriálnej hudby.Translated by Robert Kolář. Bratislava: Asociácia Corpus, 2017, 92 pp. ISBN 97880-972585-4-2 Marcus Zagorski is an American musicologist and composer currently working in the Musicology Department of the Faculty of Arts at Comenius University in Bratislava. His book ‘Elements of Serial Aesthetics’ analyses questions related to serial music or serialism. Throughout the book, Zagorski engages in fruitful dialogue with Theodor Adorno, whose Philosophy of New Music presented serial music in its philosophical, political, and social contexts. Zagorski also analyses serial music not just as a compositional method, but also as a set of ideas and an effort both to critically distance itself from prevailing aesthetic and political orthodoxy and to create a rational aesthetic system. He presents Adorno’s optimistic outline of these efforts from the 1940s and puts them into the context of contemporary serial music several decades later. Aside from the now classic Second Viennese School, Zagorski refers to music by composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and Helmut Lachenmann. Michal Lipták 3. HUNGARY Gergely Angyalosi. Dekonstrukció és esztétika. Pécs: Kronosz, 2018, 185 pp. ISBN 978-963-467-023-0 Back in the 1990s, Gergely Angyalosi (who held the chair of the Department of Aesthetics at the University of Debrecen) promised Jacques Derrida to write a book on deconstruction and aesthetics. One reason why it took so long to publish this volume was the per - sistence of the question whether it makes much sense to interpret Derrida’s philosophy from this point of view. After all, Derrida never wrote a treatise summarizing his views on art or the beautiful. Yet in many of his books, lectures, and interviews he does touch upon the classic problems of aesthetics. Rather than tackle them head on, he approaches them in roundabout ways, leaving the traditional paths and questioning the established categories, including that of aesthetics itself. The aesthetics of deconstruction thus becomes a deconstruction of aesthetics. After an introductory chapter that explains some basic characteristics of de - constructive activity and its relation to architecture and postmodernism, the next four chapters of Angyalosi’s book show how a deconstructive reading of texts works in Derrida’s interpretations of writers, poets, and philosophers such as Kafka, Joyce, Celan, Mallarmé, Artaud, Genet, Marx, Nietzsche, and Kant. Péter György. Faustus Afrikában: Szerződés a valósággal. Budapest: Magvető, 2018, 320 pp. ISBN 978-963-14-3773-7 Samuel Beckett, Hungarian novelists of the socialist era, painters of the London School, the makers of the TV series True Detective and The Leftovers, William Kentridge – if you look at the contents of Péter György’s book, whose title (borrowed partly from Kentridge) trans - lates as ‘Faustus in Africa: A Contract with Reality’, it is not at first easy to see what connects these artists. The clue is realism, but not in the sense of the art movement. Indeed, György (the director of the Institute for Art Theory and Media Studies at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest) works with a concept of realism that is at best a highly specific subcase of what the term usually refers to. He explains it in contrast to the increasingly esoteric and anti-democratic world of high art, the logic of which is known only to insiders. The meticulous analyses, which at the same time put the works of the aforementioned artists in broader historical, cultural and political contexts, show how they fulfil a contract with reality. They keep alive the promise of making truth recognizable by conveying the experience of fragmentary identity, of ruptures and new beginnings, of being displaced and forced to remember. Zoltán Papp New Publications 142 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 142 4. CZECH REPUBLIC Jiří Anger. Afekt, výraz, performance: Proměny melodramatického excesu v kinematografii těla. Prague: Filozofická fakulta Univer - zity Karlovy, 2018, 175 pp. ISBN 978-80-7308-768-5 The book ‘Affect, Expression, Performance: Transformation of Melo - dramatic Excess in the Cinema of the Body’, by the Czech film theorist Jiří Anger, deals with various ways in which the formalized expression of emotions that is characteristic of the melodramatic mode can usefully be reinterpreted in the context of experimental cinema, especially the work of the German director Werner Schroeter but also Kenneth Anger and Carmelo Bene. The melodramatic mode offers a wide repertory of stylistic features designed to express extreme emotional states or situations when the plot breaks down and freezes in a static or symbolic arrangement. Anger calls this ‘melodramatic excess’. He argues that certain experimental films transform melodramatic excess by means of ‘expressive and performative operations’ with filmic space, time, and bodies, turning the exterior representation of emotions into the immanent expression of affects. In this book Anger seeks to demonstrate how the two-way movement between melodramatic excess and the concept of affect (and affect theory, represented by Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, or Eugenie Brinkema) works and which new impulses it can bring into contemporary affect studies and film theory. Petr A. Bílek, Martin Kaplický, Vladimír Papoušek, and David Skalický. Kontext v pohybu: (Neo)pragmatické úvahy o literatuře a kul tuře. Prague: Akropolis, 2018, 296 pp. ISBN 978-80-7470220-4 How can neopragmatists respond to problems that have occupied recent Czech thinking about literature? Is it possible to find any impulses that would offer insights into debates and inquiries of Czech literary theorists? These are the questions that the four authors of this book, whose title translates as ‘Context in Motion: (Neo)pragmatic Thoughts on Literature and Culture’, seek to answer. In eight studies they consider several key neopragmatist thinkers such as Richard Rorty and Richard Shusterman, and focus on such fundamental topics as the relationship between the theory and praxis of literary criticism, the aims and limits of the interpretation of literary texts, and the aesthetic value of works of popular culture. Ivan Blecha. Prostory zjevnosti: Dílo ve struktuře světa. Zlín: Archa, 2018, 187 pp. ISBN 978-80-87545-60-7 The publication ‘The Spaces of Overtness: The Artwork in the Structure of the World’ comprises six essays, adopting predominantly the point of view of phenomenological philosophy, especially that of Martin Heidegger. In the first essay, the author ponders Protagoras’ dictum that man is the ‘measure of all things’ in the context of Heidegger’s philosophy. The second essay is dedicated to Heidegger’s reflection of Cézanne’s work in the broader field of his theory of art, and the third considers Heidegger’s concept of technology as compared to that of José Ortega y Gasset’s. The next essay focuses on Jan Patočka’s aesthetic thought and Hegel’s Aesthetics (translated into Czech by Patočka), mainly in the domain of the visual arts. The last two essays deal with questions of space, drawing on the work of, among others, Pierre Francastel and Edmund Husserl. Lubomír Doležel. Heterocosmica III: Fikční světy protomoderní čes ké prózy. Prague: Karolinum, 2018, 196 pp. ISBN 978-80-246-3890-4 The book entitled ‘Heterocosmica III: The Fictional Worlds of ProtoModern Czech Fiction’ is a continuation of Lubomír Doležel’s long-term project on the theory of literature. The monograph Heterocosmica. Fiction and Possible Worlds (1998) is one of the most praised and influential outlines of a theory of narrative fictional worlds; its sequel, Heterocosmica II: The Fictional Worlds of Postmodern Czech Fiction (2014) is Doležel’s theory applied to the works of several Czech postmodern authors. The final book deals with another set of Czech authors and their works, this time from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: ranging from Julius Zeyer, who inspired younger Czech Decadent authors, through Vilém Mrštík and Růžena Svobodová, to Karel and Josef Čapek and Ivan Olbracht, proponents of interwar modernism. Doležel analyses selected New Publications Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 143 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 143 texts by these authors in terms of their narrative structures and the fictional worlds they present. To most of the chapters he adds a‘terminological remark’, further illuminating some of his general concepts. The book thus does not fall into the genre of literary history plain and simple, but rather that of narrative poetics. Ludmila Dostálová and Miloš Ševčík, eds. Studie k teorii umění Henri Focillona: Život forem v žitém světě. Prague: Filosofický časopis and Filosofia, 2018, 88 pp. ISBN 978-80-7007-550-0 The publication ‘Studies on Henri Focillon’s Theory of Art: The Life of Forms in the Lived World’ presents four essays by Czech and Slovak authors which were originally delivered at the philosophy workshop at the University of West Bohemia, in Pilsen, on 4 May 2017. These four studies (whose titles read ‘The Explosive Potential of the Living Forms of Henri Focillon’, ‘Form and Style’, ‘The Concepts of Space and Architecture in Henri Focillon’s Work The Life of Forms’, and ‘Rift and Disharmony: Focillon’s Conception of Relation between Art and Environment’) attempt to map, and also to bring back into the focus of contemporary scholars, the original philosophical and aesthetic thought of the largely forgotten French philosopher Henri Focillon (1881–1943) as presented mainly in his most influential book The Life of Forms. The four essays are supplemented by a Czech translation of Focillon’s study ‘In Praise of Hands’ (‘Éloge de la main’, 1939). Tomáš Dvořák et al. Fotografie, socha, objekt. Prague: NAMU, 2017, 224 pp. ISBN 978-80-7331-466-8 The volume ‘Photography, Sculpture, Object’ consists of eight essays by art historians, curators, philosophers, and artists, all focusing on the question of the borderline between photography and sculpture. They deal with historical as well as current relationships between these two media and ponder questions from the photographic reproduction of sculptures to the mutual mingling of both media in art and culture in general. Hana Buddeus deals with the role of photography as the medium of art history in the 1930s in Czechoslovakia; Filip Suchomel analyses the photographic documentation of Japanese cultural heritage in the 1870s and 1880s; Petra Šemíková focuses on the role of photography in the creative processes of Auguste Rodin and the modernist Czech sculptor Stanislav Sucharda; Josef Ledvina discusses the artistic practice of the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm; Hynek Alt elaborates on the relationship between Rodin’s sculptures and contemporary photography; Tomáš Dvořák analyses the problem of chance in photography; Ladislav Šerý meditates on the fetish character of photography; and Václav Janoščík gives an account of contemporary artistic strategies connecting photography with its material and object-based conditions. Daniel Jobertová and Alice Koubová, eds. Artistic Research: Is There Some Method? Prague: NAMU, 2017, 191 pp. ISBN 978-807331-472-9 This collection of thirteen essays, published in English, originated in an international conference organized by the editors – the theatre theorist Daniela Jobertová and the philosopher Alice Koubová, at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague on 7–9 April 2016. Artistic research, state the editors, may currently appear a trendy business, with its advantages and disadvantages. It is dynamic and not restricted by any rigid definition. It exploits new possibilities by deconstructing the traditional dualities of European thinking, like the ones between science and art, perception and thinking, subjectivity and objectivity, body and mind. Artistic research develops its potential in different areas of overlap, in tensions, and in boundary fields across disciplines. It is characterized by heteronomy, heterotopy, in-between space or a polyphony of sources, procedures, and results. The essays in the volume seek to map the diverse conceptual terrain of this field. The book is divided into three parts, which contain chapters referring to the three different standpoints in methodology. New Publications 144 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 144 Jan Josl. Umění a péče o duši u Jana Patočky. Prague: Karolinum, 2018, 142 pp. ISBN 978-80-246-3832-4 The book, whose title translates as ‘Art and Caring for the Soul in Jan Patočka’, approaches Patočka’s philosophy of art from the perspective of ‘caring for the soul’. The author, as he himself states, has chosen to focus on caring for the soul because this concept, together with a few others (like the natural world and phenomenology) expresses the essence of Patočka’s philosophy. Approaching art from the perspective of caring for the soul offers a complex view of the position and meaning of art in Patočka’s thought. The monograph is divided into four thematic parts: the first introduces the concept of caring for the soul in relation to the philosophy of history; the second part focuses on the development of Patočka’s reflections of art throughout his philosophical career; the third considers the history of art and presents Patočka’s conception of the history of art as a history of the soul; the last part elaborates on Patočka’s thoughts about the notion of the end of art. Eva Krásová. Z hlediska smyslu…: Émile Benveniste a zrod strukturalismu. Prague: Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, 2018, 411 pp. ISBN 978-80-7308-769-2 This volume, whose title translates as ‘From the Point of View of Meaning: Émile Benveniste and the Birth of Structuralism’, is a mo - nograph about the life and work of Émile Benveniste (1902–1977) viewed through the concept of meaning (sens). Using the meth - odology of E. F. K. Kœrner, it examines the theoretical foundations of Benveniste’s thought in the schools of Paris (Antoine Meillet and Michel Bréal), Prague (Roman Jakobson and Vladimír Skalička) and Copenhagen (texts from about 1939). It treats Benveniste’s concept of the linguistics of discourse, together with the concepts of ‘semiotics and semantics’ / ‘the semiotic and the semantic’ (le/la sémiotique,sémantique), ‘enunciation’ (énonciation), ‘appropriation’ (appropriation) and the ‘hierarchy of systems’, as the place where meaning is born. Two meanings of ‘meaning’ are distinguished, and the problems that arise from their confusion are highlighted. Manuscript and archive sources are used to show the influence that Louis Hjelmslev, Roman Jakobson, J. L. Austin, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Vladimír Skalička had on Benveniste. The reflection of personal identity in time in French thought is the point of departure for a study of the affinities between Émile Benveniste and Jacques Derrida during the 1960s, especially concerning the concept of écriture. A short study of Benveniste’s importance for the ‘structural analysis of narration’ (particularly of Roland Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov) is used to underline Benveniste’s importance to French structuralism. Ivan Landa et al. Imaginace a forma: Mezi estetickým formalismem a filosofií emancipace; Studie Josefu Zumrovi. Prague: Filosofia, 2018, 413 pp. ISBN 978-80-7007-500-5 The festschift ‘Imagination and Form: Between Aesthetic Formalism and the Philosophy of Emancipation’, edited by the Czech philosopher Ivan Landa, has been put together to mark the ninetieth birthday of Josef Zumr, ahistorian of the Czech philosophical tradition. The scope of Zumr’s works is broad, encompassing philosophical currents such as Herbartism (represented by the followers of Johann Friedrich Herbart), Russian formalism, Marxism, surrealism and structuralism, as well as figures such as Karel Hynek Mácha, Ladislav Klíma, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Emanuel Chalupný, Josef Ludvík Fischer, Karel Teige, Karel Kosík, and Robert Kalivoda. Zumr’s work also transcends the narrowly delineated boundaries of scholarly disciplines, freely moving, for example, from aesthetics to literary theory, from metaphysics to political and social philosophy, from historiography to the philosophy of history. One element, however, links together all of Zumr’s writing: an understanding of Czech philosophy as a history of emancipatory thought. The present volume attempts to capture this unifying bond in Zumr’s thought in fifteen original studies by philosophers and literary theorists divided into six thematic sections. The book concludes with an extensive interview with Josef Zumr conducted in the summer of 2017 by Roman Kanda and Jan Mervart. New Publications Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 145 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 145 Ondřej Sládek et al. Slovník literárněvědného strukturalismu. Brno: Host, 2018, 834 pp. ISBN 978-80-88069-64-5 ‘A Dictionary of Structuralist Literary Theory and Criticism’ is an extensive vade mecum of structuralism, describing the facets and forms of twentieth-century structuralist thought in literary criticism and its neighbouring disciplines. More than 300 entries written by 31 authors present, in an accessible way, fundamental theoretical and methodological approaches, paradigms, key concepts, movements, and schools of structuralist literary theory and criticism, both from the historical and current point of view. Besides the entries from the field of literary criticism, it contains many concepts from linguistics, aesthetics, semiotics, and anthropology. The individual entries are in the form of comprehensive essays and are interlinked by thorough cross-referencing. They also contain detailed bibliographies. The authors draw pre - dominantly on the heritage of the Prague School, but do not confine themselves to this tradition. The dictionary is intended for scholars, students, and the public interested in literary theory, aesthetics, linguistics, philosophy, the history of science, and literary criticism. Dalibor Tureček. Sumář: Diskurzivita české literatury 19. století. Brno: Host, 2018, 146 pp. ISBN 978-80-7577-603-7 The book, entitled ‘Discursivity in Nineteenth-century Czech Litera - ture: A Summary’, by the Czech literary historian Dalibor Tureček, is a theoretical and methodological counterpart of several publications on nineteenth-century Czech literature by the same author and his collaborators, applying Peter Zajac’s ‘synoptic-pulsating approach’ in literary history. The book has two parts. In the first, the methodo - logical part, literary history is construed as a model consisting of four fundamental layers: axioms, construction principles, instruments, and working procedures. Literature is perceived from the point of view of aesthetics and historical poetics and the basic cognitive frameworks are discursive analysis, the synoptic-pulsating approach, and the latency category. The history of literature is viewed not as a linear and causal development but as diverse, inherently polymorphous, dynamic change, taking place in a multilayered morphogenetic field. The second part of the book focuses on particular discourses of nineteenth-century Czech literature: Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, and Parnassianism. These are conceived not as successive phases but rather as tendencies defined by their differences as well as by their overlapping in the course of time and on levels ranging from genre to the structure of individual texts. Štěpán Kubalík and Josef Šebek New Publications 146 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 00–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 146