'The magnificent sense of being relevant': A comparative study of Milan Kundera and Andre Brink (Czech Republic, South Africa)

This dissertation reevaluates the vexed relationship between literature and politics by comparing selected works of fiction by Czech writer Milan Kundera--a vociferous proponent of "l'art pour l'art"--and the overtly committed South African author Andre Brink. Upon embracing Brink's recent conception of a "sliding scale" between "litterature engagee" and "l'art pour l'art," it proceeds to challenge the vision of an "apolitical" Kundera and a "political" Brink on three levels: the representation of author figures in Kundera's Life is Elsewhere and Brink's States of Emergency; the construction of public and private spaces in Kundera's The Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being: and Brink's Looking on Darkness and A Dry White Season; and the treatment of memory in Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Brink's Imaginings of Sand. Moreover, this study's second chapter argues for a broader definition of politics which recognizes the power infusing all levels of human interaction. As it does so, it challenges the viability of generic criticism which would reserve the term "political novel" for a small body of literature.; In addition to examining the fiction of Kundera and Brink, this study considers the contemporary writings of other Czech and South African authors who have wrestled with similar issues of writer responsibility as well as the intersections between literature and both public and private manifestations of power. This dual focus is most obvious in the study's final chapter, where an exploration of Kundera's Slowness and Brink's On the Contrary is juxtaposed with a discussion of such authors as Josef Skvorecky, Jiri Grusa, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee. The purpose of this approach is to determine the value of the term "postmodernism" for a study of authors whose native homes exist outside the First World. It uncovers the common ground between postcolonial criticism and a new tendency towards recognizing various national postmodernisms. The latter view accommodates a more flexible definition of politics while recognizing the specificity of sociocultural contexts and the circulation of cultural ideas across geopolitical borders.