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Like Diogenes, Švejk lingers at the margins of an unfriendly society against which he is defending his independent existence. "Švejking" is the method for surviving "švejkárna", which is a situation or institution of systemic absurdity requiring the employment of "švejking" for one to survive and remain untouched by it.
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ANALYSES
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A. Analyses of
Švejk
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On Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk
Ian Johnston
"What Hašek is ridiculing here lies close to the heart of any complex modern institution."
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Tropos Kynikos: Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk
Peter Steiner
Originally published in 1994 in "an obscure Prague"journal", the authors says.
(As it turns out, it was published as The Cynic Hero: Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk
in Litteraria Pragensia
- Roč. [vol.] 4, č. [#] 8. - 1994. - S.[pp] 48-91.)
Four years later it appeared in the International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication
Poetics Today 19:4 (1998), pp.469-98
.
With some additional introductory material it became
the first chapter
of Peter Steiner's book The Deserts of Bohemia: Czech Fiction and Its Social Context
reproduced here by permission from the author and the publisher, Cornell University Press:
"Like Diogenes, Švejk lingers at the margins of an unfriendly society against which he is defending his independent existence."
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Švejk: A Hero For Our Time
Zenny K. Sadlon
"The Czech and Slovak 20th Century in Retrospect: 1918-1938" Conference, March 2-3, 2001:
"The spreading of absurdity is a key element upon which Mike Joyce and I rest our prediction that
Švejk will become a household word even in the United States and other Anglophone countries at last,
just as Catch 22 has."
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Imperium Stupidum: Švejk, Satire, Sabotage
Erica Weitzman
"Law and Literature, Summer 2006,
Vol. 18, No. 2, Pages 117–148
"This article argues
that the satire of Švejk lies less in the irreverence and humor of its content than in its deep structural mechanisms of repetition, delay, and non-resistance
pushed to the point of absurdity."
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The
Slav v. The Slave — Two Literal Fools — Speak Truth to Power
A Comparison of Subversive Narrative Strategies in "Aesop without
Morals" and Jaroslav Hasek's "The Good Soldier Svejk."
Danusha V. Goska
"... Aesop struck me as what black people might
call a 'white man's nigger;'
struck me as a variation of Polish-American playwright Arthur Miller's Willy
Loman in Death of a Salesman.
Of Svejk and Aesop, Svejk is the more subversive narrator; his is the more
subversive narrative."
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Hašek's Good Soldier Švejk as a Picaresque Novel
Thomas Kovach
Germano-Slavica, Spring 1984, Vol. IV, No. 5, pp. 251-264:
"Many critics have compared Švejk to other 'mythic' figures of Western literature, such as Don Quixote, Faust, or (more appropriately) Sancho Panza."
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Jaroslav Hašek 1883-1983
Proceedings of the International Hašek Symposion Bamberg, June 25-28, 1983.
[West Slavic Contributions - Westslavische Beiträge vol. 1]
PETER LANG Frankfurt am Main - Bern - New York - Paris, 1989.
"Hašek is the most widely acclaimed (and disputed) Czech author,
and also the Czech writer whose twisted path toward acceptance is worth the attention not only of
'Haškologists',
but also of theoreticians of literature, as this collection of essays tries to prove."
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The Good Soldier Svejk
Macdonald Daly
New Internationalist Classic Review, issue 262 - December 1994
"...being the book that teaches us who makes history ... The critic JP Stern has called The Good Soldier Svejk 'the only genuine popular creation of modern European literature; "
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On
the Integrity of the Good Soldier Schweik
J. P. Stern
Forum
for Modern Language Studies, II(1):14-24, 1966 - Court of the
University of St Andrews, Oxford
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back to »Contents
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B. Švejk in
Analyses
of other subjects
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Living
in the iron cage of performance management: exit the street level bureaucrat,
enter the good soldier Svejk?
S. White, and D. Wastell, K. Broadhurst, S. Peckover, D. Davey, and A. Pithouse
International Journal of Social Welfare, Special Issue, 2009
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The
Phantom of the Good Soldier Švejk in the Czech Army Accession to NATO (2001–2002)
Hana Cervinkova
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume
22, Number 3 / September, 2009
"The article shows
how the current official efforts at changing the image of the Czech military
focus on the obliteration of Švejk’s cultural idiom,
bringing him so frequently to the public discourse that they produce a
phantom-like effect in which Švejk has come to haunt the process directed at
his expurgation."
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The Good Dissident Švejk: An exploration of Czech morality and
cultural survival
Heidi Bludau
Kosmas,
22.2 (Spring 2009)
reproduced here by permission of the author and the publisher
"The ideal Czech
dissident is not Havel or Palach or even Hus but Švejk,
the fat, beer-loving, bumbling, self-proclaimed, certified idiot of a
soldier.
When Czechs resist a political power, Švejk comes back to life.
As the anti-hero of the beloved and famed novel by Jaroslav Hašek,
Švejk represents the Czech spirit of resistance."
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Perverted
Research and the Political Imagination - The Trial of the Good Scholar Švejk
Paul A. Taylor
European Political Science, Volume 7, Number 3, August 2008 , pp.
335-351(17)
"The Research
Assessment Exercise and its successor - the Research Excellence Framework - are
examined as contemporary examples of
a perversion of academic discourse in British universities that threatens to
spread to the rest of Europe."
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Svejkian
Geopolitics: Subversive Obedience in Central Europe
Merje Kuus
Geopolitics,
Volume 13, Number 2, April 2008 , pp. 257-277(21), Routledge
By foregrounding Svejkian absurd obedience, which is nonetheless highly
subversive, the article contributes to a better understanding of popular
geopolitics, resistance geopolitics, and more broadly, the role of human agency
in geopolitical discourses.
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Czech
foreign policy: Farewell to Svejk
Robert Schuster
The Analyst - Central and Eastern European Review - English Edition
(02/2007), pp. 47-56.
"For many years Czech
foreign policy was best characterized by the attitude represented by the
protagonist of Jaroslav Hasek’s novel The Good Soldier Svejk: namely, that
it is best to avoid conflicts altogether, but that if they do become
unavoidable, then they are to be endured with good humour or with an effort to
somehow survive the situation.
In this respect, the decision by the centre-right government of Mirek Topolánek
to approve construction of an American radar station on Czech territory can be
seen as a paradigm shift."
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back to »Contents
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History Comes to You: Kafka, Svejk, and
The Butcher’s Wife: Postcommunism, Postcolonialism and Central Europe
Nikola
Petkovic
History
of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe: Junctions and Disjunctions in
the 19th and 20th Centuries VOLUME II, ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and
John Neubauer, John Benjamin Press, 2006, pp. 376-389
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The
Good Soldier Svejk and a Sociological Account of National Identification
Jaroslaw Kilias
Polish Sociological Review 2(150), 2005, pp. 163-179
"The author proposes
a conceptual framework for an account of nationality which respects the
multidimensional nature of the nation and hence the contextual and multi-level
nature of national identification.
To illustrate his claims, the author quotes Jaroslav Hasšek’s The Good
Soldier Švejk."
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Monitoring,
Rules, and the Control Paradox: Can the Good Soldier Svejk Be Trusted?
Gary J. Miller
In Trust
and Distrust in Organizations: Dilemmas and Approaches
Roderick M. Kramer and Karen S. Cook, ed. Russell Sage Foundation, New York,
N.Y., 2004, pp. 99-127.
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Criminal
Apprehensions: Prague Minorities And the Habsburg Legal System in Jaroslav Hašek's the Good Soldier Švejk and Franz Kafka's the Trial
Jenifer Cushman
In Rodopi
Perspectives on Modern Literature, Literature
and Law, Volume 30, Edited by Michael J. Meyer. , Amsterdam/New York,
NY, 2004, VIII,pp. 51-65(15)
"Indeed, there is a sanctuary space in Hašek's
text for those "in the know," a comfort zone that Kafka does not
provide in his 'deterritorialized' writing;
Josef Švejk is able to evade public authority through word play, but Josef K.
is ultimately convicted by his 'criminal apprehension,' his guilty conscience in
the inhuman system."
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Looking for the Good Soldier, Švejk: Alternative Modalities of Resistance in the Contemporary Workplace
Peter Fleming, Graham Sewell
Sociology, Volume 36, Issue 4, November 2002, pp 857-873:
"... Švejk never pulled his cons, ruses and stunts at the expense of his 'comrades', his hapless fellow foot soldiers ..."
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back to »Contents
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Conversation
– Strategies of Understanding and Pseudo-Understanding
Radka Vlahova
In Стил
(Style), Volume
1, pp. 165-172, The
International Association Style, 2002
The presentation of interactive language use as
cognitive is also a model of the type
“understanding as pseudo-understanding”. This kind of language use could be
called
“the Švejk model”.
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Instrumental
psychosis: the
Good Soldier Svejk syndrome
P Tyrer, N Babidge, J Emmanuel, N Yarger and M Ranger
Department of Public Mental Health, Division of Neuroscience and Psychological
Medicine, Imperial College School of Medicine, London, UK.
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol 94, Issue 1 22-25, January
2001
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The
Good Soldier Svejk and after: the comic tradition in Czech film
Peter Hames
100
years of European cinema: Entertainment of Ideology?, ed. Diana
Holmes, Allison Smith, Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 64-76
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The
politics and hermeneutics of anarchist satire: Jaroslav Hasek's The good soldier
Švejk
John Snyder
Lit:
Literature Interpretation Theory, Volume 2, Issue 4 May 1991,
pages 289 - 301, Routledge
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Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership
by
F. G. Bailey
Review author[s]: Malcolm Ruel
Man, New Series, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Sep., 1990), pp. 543-544
"... has several revealing pages on what Svejk
reveals about organizations." - Gary Miller
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Švejk Don Quixote Jesus Christ
Gaifman, Hana Arie:
In Foundations of
Semiotics, From Sign to Text: A Semiotic View of Communication
YishaiTobin, ed. , Amsterdam, Netherlands. Series No: 20. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1989, 191-213.
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