On this modern highway, lost in the jungle : tropics, travel, and colonialism in Czech poetry / Jan Mrázek.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mrázek, Jan, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Czech poetry.

Slavic philology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (323 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Prague, Czech Republic : Karolinum Press, [2022]

Summary:

Postcolonial reflections on Indonesia's influence upon the avant-garde poetry of a non-colonial European. In 1926, the Communist avant-garde poet Konstantin Biebl (1898-1951) traveled from Czechoslovakia to the Dutch East Indies. In the writings from his journal--texts simultaneously poetic and comic--both landlocked Bohemia and the colonized tropical islands are seen in disorienting new perspectives, like "mirrors looking at themselves in each other." Jan Mrázek's On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungletakes us on a journey of our own, crisscrossing Biebl's life and work--with particular attention to his travel writing--as they mirror Mrázek's own experiences as a multinational academic: a Prague conservatory graduate, educated at Michigan and Cornell, and now a scholar of Indonesia living in Singapore. Biebl's writings are also the book's point of departure for a broader exploration of the intersections of travel and poetry, issues of colonial and social injustice, and the representation of otherness in the Czech literary and visual imagination. In its attention to how poetic travel reflects the Czech historical experience in the shadow of imperial nations, Mrázek's book elevates scholarly reflection on literary travel, modernity, and colonialism to a new level.

Contents:

Cover

Table of contents

List of figures

Acknowledgments

Preamble

Part One | The mirror of time

Parrots and monkeys

The first palm

Where grenades fall, there green palms grow

First Excursion | Parrots on motorcycles: exoticisms of the Czech avant-garde in the 1920s

Metaphors, dreams, travel

Workers . . . Indians!

Through the train window-Don't worry, I am not going to Paris

Second Excursion | His head that watches us over the century's edge: poetic travels in the nineteenth century

The notebook that he lost somewhere on the ship

With the ship that carries tea and coffee

Half-black, you understand? Here you have to be careful!

New Icarus and the mestiza My Beautiful Arsiti

Again some Malay landscape

The jungle around us

Sailors of all seas unite!

Your longest and most adventurous journey

Again and again man is proving that he has no wings

Part Two | A hundred rose petals, on them no words

Silences

Sounds, smells, tastes

Typography-optic configurations

Photographs, cinema, and the magazine Home and the World

Picture postcards

Snapshots and reflections: poetry | travel | photography | death

Author's note on translations and sources

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9788024651262

8024651262