Date Published:

Abstract:

The study examines two autofictional narratives — The Seventh Autobiography (2000) and The Eight, or Unfinished Autobiography (2007) by the Czech writer Ota Filip (1930–2018). The texts were written in reaction to a media scandal as well as some traumatic events in the author’s private life. The study attempts to understand the different ways in which the two texts were received, both in the Czech context and when compared to the reactions to the German version, Der siebente Lebenslauf (2001). The cognitive-hermeneutic theory of autobiography and autofiction by Liesbeth Korthals Altes is the basis of my analysis of textual and paratextual clues that allow reading the Autobiographies in different cognitive frames, or in the evaluation framework of “five worlds” as presented by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. An intepretation of Filip’s works within the concept of the “Inspired World” is also related to the context of Czech autofiction literature (Ludvík Vaculík, Pavel Kohout, Bohumil Hrabal).

December 2024: Jan Tlustý is an associate professor in the Department of Czech Literature at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno, as well as in the Department of Czech Language and Literature at the Faculty of Education, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. He serves as chief editor of the scholarly journal Bohemica Litteraria. His research focuses on interpretation and aesthetic experience, particularly from the perspectives of phenomenology, hermeneutics, cognitive science and Czech poststructuralism (studies on Jan Patočka, Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, Milan Jankovič, and others). He is the author of Příliš hlučná prázdnota: Mezery, otřesy a smysl literárního díla, 2022 (Too loud an emptiness: Gaps, shaking, and meaning in works of literature). His research also extends to autofiction in Czech and world literatures (studies on Bohumil Hrabal, Ota Filip, and John Maxwell Coetzee) and to the work of literary scholar Zdeněk Kožmín.