FOR AUTHORS

Offer to publish in journal

Stredoeurópske pohľady (Volume 5, Issue 2/2023)

Thematic focus: Antisemitism in the Art and Media of the V4 Countries
Abstract submission deadline (max. 150 words/1 paragraph): 30 June, 2023
Final paper submission deadline: 31 August, 2023
E-mail: ceviews2020@gmail.com
Editors of the issue: prof. PhDr. Miloš Zelenka, DrSc. – doc. PhDr. Zuzana Vargová, PhD. – Mgr. Michal Krauter

The editors of the journal a thematic call for a monothematic issue of Stredoeurópske pohľady (No. 2/2023) entitled Antisemitism in Art and Media of the V4 Countries, which, in a connection to current research on stereotypes and theoretical reflection of key concepts and forms of antisemitism in the literature of the V4 countries, will be thematically focused on current research of the presentation of antisemitic mental stereotypes in the space of artistic and literary works (especially mental stereotypes in the form of dialogues and monologues of fictional literary characters, or narrators), media and also in Internet discussions, which thematise this discourse. Individual studies should be devoted to the interpretation of elements of antisemitic discourse such as linguistic, stylistic, iconic, narrative and discursive in its rhetorical-persuasive level, complex imagological in a broad comparative perspective. Although there is an interdisciplinary reflection of antisemitism in the artistic and media spheres, an interdisciplinary subtext referring to a broader, sociological-historical perspective of knowledge should not be overlooked. In it, antisemitism is interpreted as a powerful instrument of oppression against an ethnic or religious minority, both in the form of organized and random collective violence. The goal of such focused contributions is to formulate whether, compared to the 19th and 20th centuries, the currently presented mental stereotype of the Jew, his current representation, has changed. It is about how the alleged “pansemitism” is linguistically named, what iconic form this image acquires, what properties, actions and stories are mythological and attributive and what conceptual discourse looks like, in the form of “suggestions” for “effective” solutions, which represents the so-called traditional antisemitism (genocide, ritual murder, responsibility for catastrophes, respect for Christian symbols, etc.) or modern, innovative myth (e.g. alleged Jewish exaggeration of the Holocaust as a tool of political power).

Papers can analyse individual types and forms of antisemitism (e.g. religious antisemitism, economic, national, racist, political, historic or global one), including the presentation of the problem of verbal violence as the most radical expression of antisemitism. At the same time, the editors draw attention to the importance of mapping the heterogeneous media space affecting social consciousness, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, that is on verbal and iconic manifestations of hidden and explicitly manifested antisemitic propaganda, whether in the daily press, in advertising and political leaflets, in daily pamphlets, or in the statements of famous personalities, as well as in Internet discussions on social networks. Political propaganda during the Second World War, which negatively shaped the presentation and public opinion of this minority and which often led to its stigmatization, forms a specific research area. It is not by chance that the forms of verbal-iconic typification through the caricature of the deformed image of the human body were aimed at the canonization of emotionally affecting Jewish stereotypes. The analysis of the sociological-aesthetic reflection of Jewish antisemitism in foreign films, especially in the “Golden” Sixties of Czech and Slovak cinematography of the past century. It is these films responding to so-called second post-war wave in Czech and Slovak culture, which portrayed manifestations of antisemitism in the protectorate atmosphere or in the reality of the Slovak State, whether through the themes of Aryanization, the Holocaust or forced displacement, were one of the most artistically valuable and receptively effective forms in the history of cinema.

The monothematic issue is based on the research orientation of the Ústav stredoeurópskych jazykov a kultúr FSŠ UKF in Nitra focused on the study of intercultural Central European communication, in which the Jewish element represents a relevant imagotypic structure. This representative symbolic archetype of Central Europe embodies the history of this cultural area, in which the Jewish tragic fate generally reflects the psychological trauma of the Central European intellectual, uprooted from his “native” soil. For this reason, individual contributions may reflect a semantic conflict (antisemitism, anti-Judaism, Shoah etc.) or terminological overlay and metonymic affinity of the complementary interrelated phenomena of Jewishness and Central Europeanism, because writers of Jewish origin living in Central Europe, such as F. Kafka, B. Schulz, I. Bashevicz, E. Canetti, G. Konrad, S. Márai, etc., were often referred to as “Central European” writers. From this fact comes the knowledge that the artistic reflection of Central Europe is closely connected to the mental image of Jewish fate and also with manifestations of antisemitism. All sorts of ideas about Central Europe (as imaginary or spiritual space resp.) were always supplemented by the historical fact reacting to different forms of ethnic and racial nationalism, which was motivated by fear of national existence or fear of territorial losses. Not by chance the literary theme of the Holocaust or Shoah has become one of the fundamental archetypes of the Central European literary communication. In the works by A. Lustig, L. Fuks, J. Andrzejewský, R. Jašík, I. Kertész, etc., it brought its human dimension and became, as the Czech theoretician J. Kroutvor pointed out, a reason for crying or, in a more fortunate case, for an anecdote. The mental stereotype of antisemitism was often reflected in the linguistic, compositional and thematic structure, i.e., for instance when presenting a character, environment, atmosphere, in expressive areas or in developing a plot and subject plan.

The thematic and methodological framework of the proposed contributions we try to indicate here are optional. They can simultaneously study the intersemiotic transfers of individual stereotypes, their migration from text to text in the form of special identification elements, which in the adaptation chain lead either to canonization, or to radical transformation of antisemitic expressions. The editors, who reserve the right to editorial and linguistic editing of the text, accept yet unpublished contributions of a methodological nature (globally describing the given problem), literary theoretical and literary historical papers (based on a heuristic basis and/or original empirical evidence). In addition to the peer-reviewed papers, they also accept reports, reviews or other contributions thematically corresponding to the focus of the monothematic issue. The editors accept abstract contributions until 30 June, 2023 (max. 150 words/1 paragraph). Contributions can be published in V4 languages (Slovak, Czech, Polish, and Hungarian), in English, and, by agreement with the editors, in other world languages, with formal instructions valid for the journal Stredoeurópske pohľady. Based on an independent and successfully completed review process, the selected authors will be informed by the editors about the acceptance of their contribution by September 30, 2023. The expected publication of the issue is December 2023.June