Allegories of Absence: Richard Weiner and Karel Čapek

Author: M醠ek Petr  

Publisher: Maney Publishing

ISSN: 1479-0963

Source: Central Europe, Vol.9, Iss.2, 2011-11, pp. : 83-107

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Abstract

Examining the relationship between two of the most significant Czech writers of the early twentieth century, Richard Weiner (1884–1937) and Karel Čapek (1890–1938), this article sets their divergent developmental paths into the context of broader issues within European Modernism as a whole. The re-emergence of 'allegory' as privileged aesthetic category — represented prominently by Walter Benjamin's work in the 1920s — characterizes a cultural phenomenon that can be termed 'melancholy Modernism'. Weiner and Čapek's contrasting responses to this melancholy allegorical impulse trace a fundamental fault line within the philosophical and historical development of Modernism.