Milan Kundera: A Wide Garden

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel attempts to widen the scope of inquiry into Milan Kundera’s thought and art in several ways: by examining works of his that fall outside the narrower oeuvre that Kundera himself has declared to be authoritative and that has drawn the overwhelming majority of critical and scholarly attention to date; by exploring less studied aspects of his intellectual and aesthetic genealogy; and by challenging some prevailing interpretations of his philosophical positions and his poetics. While pursuing different methodologies and focusing on different stages of Kundera’s career, the papers on this panel are united by the ideal of understanding and presenting their subject in as multifaceted, undogmatic and nuanced a manner as possible—much as a young Milan Kundera sought to understand and present the subject of his inquiry—the individual human soul and its relationship to society—in a 1953 volume of poetry, Man, A Wide Garden.

Sub Unit

• Literature: Central and Southeast Europe

Chair

• Jonathan H. Bolton, Harvard U

Papers

• Subtle Subversity in Milan Kundera's 'Man, a Wide Garden' - Hana Pichova, UNC at Chapel Hill

• The French Enlightenment: Sources of Milan Kundera's Sense of Irony and Cultural Identity - Daniel Webster Pratt, Ohio State U

• The Problem of Fatherhood in Milan Kundera's Fiction - Christopher W. Harwood, Columbia U

Discussant

• Jessica E Merrill, Columbia U