The Czech Avant-Garde Literary Movement Between the World Wars

Thomas G. Winner was born in Prague. He left Czechoslovakia in 1939 to attend Harvard University, where he had won one of the coveted fellowships designed to get students out of Nazi-occupied Europe. He received his BA and his MA from Harvard and his PhD from Columbia University. He was a Professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature at Duke University, University of Michigan, and Brown University. At Brown he directed the Center for Research in Semiotics. He was awarded an honorary degree from Masaryk University in Brno in 1995. In 1997 he was awarded the Dobrovsky Medal from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and in 1988 received the Laureate Memorial Medal on the occasion of the 650th anniversary of Charles University in Prague. His previous books include Kazakh Literature and Oral Art and Chekhov and His Prose as well as many edited volumes and over 160 scholarly articles.

Contents: The Antecedents – The Proletarian Movement and the Evolution of Poetist Theory – The Poetist Practice of Vítězslav Nezval – The Poetist Practice of Jaroslav Seifert – The Poetist Prose of Vladislav Vančura – The Relation of the Prague Linguistic Circle to Poetism – From Poetism to Surrealism.

«At last, the Czech literary avant-garde between the wars is the subject of a book as lively as its most intoxicating poetic creations. Like his mentor and friend Roman Jakobson, Thomas G. Winner was a linguistic polymath, a capacious thinker, and the embodiment of all that was most admirable in the cosmopolitan tradition of European scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic. Winner’s imagination and formidable skills as a scholar are on impressive display in this book, which covers the visual arts, theater, music, and philosophy. Anyone seeking an introduction to the intensely vibrant culture of Czech modernism can do no better than this study, the lifework of one of the most thoughtful interpreters of literature of the twentieth century.» (Edward Dimendberg, Professor of Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, University of California, Irvine)