Are Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, Kyle MacLachlan in The Trial and Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being walking through the same city of Prague? Yes and no. More detailed answers can be found in the course.

The course is designed in the interdisciplinary pattern: It analyses the “archetypal” as well as temporary historical images of Prague as they appear in literature, visual arts, photography, postcards, movies, commercials, and websites through the course of a millennium, focusing of the era of the 19th and 20th centuries and its recent status. Walking virtually through Prague of the National Revival era, Prague of the industrialization and modernity crisis, Prague of the Nazi occupation, and Prague of the Communist totalitarian system, we will focus on its sociological, semiotic, and symbolic key icons: central squares, churches, observations towers, statues and monuments, cemeteries. Next to key prose fiction texts (the Golem story; Kafka: The Trial; Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Hrabal: Too Loud a Solitude), we will also make use of selected theoretical conceptualizations (Barthes, Eco, Deleuze, Cixous). Half of the course is spent in the classroom and consists of interpretations of literary and visual samples of the image of Prague; the other half is devoted to field trips guided by the instructor that take students to the Disneyland Prague of today’s tourism but also to places with no tourist footprint yet. Some time will be devoted also to comparative analyses of the images of other metropolitan cities (New York, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest).
The course meets for three hours per week in two sessions.

Course requirements: reading (about 200 pages per week); writing a journal (15-20 pages of text); mid-term paper (1,500 words); final paper (2,500 words)

Petr Bílek

Full professor of Modern Czech Literature at the Department of Czech and Comparative Literature, Charles University. He belongs among the prominent Czech literary theorists and historians. He has published books on contemporary theories of interpretating narratives, on James Bond and his Communist Czech TV equivalent, on pop culture of the Communist era and on contemporary poetry, along with a number of articles in Czech, English, Italian, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Croatian, Hungarian, and Slovak. In 1994-1995, he was a Visiting Professor at Brown University. In 1995 he received a Mellon Post Doctoral Scholarship to continue his research there for two more years. He returned to Brown University as a Visiting Professor in Spring 2000. He has lectured in Hamburg, Uppsala, Stockholm, Budapest, Dublin, London, Glasgow, Lyon, Munich, Amsterdam, Aarhus, and at University of Texas, University of North Carolina, Florida International University, Columbia University, and Yale University. His most recent book Models of Representations in Czech Literary History (co-written by Vladimír Papoušek) has been published by Eastern European Monographs, Boulder, Colorado, in 2010.