Bohumil Hrabals litterära collage

Sammanfattning: The main theme of the thesis is an analysis of three texts by the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal (1914 – 1997), namely ’Mrtvomat’ (’Mrtvomat’, 1949), This City is in the Joint Care of Its Inhabitants (Toto mìsto je ve spoleèné péèi obyvatel, 1967), and ’Legend Played on Strings Stretched Between the Cradle and the Coffin’ (’Legenda zahraná na strunách mezi kolébkou a rakví’, 1968). These texts are compiled of segments, selected from the works of other authors and fragments of overheard conversations. The thesis presents a theory that with these texts Hrabal has created a new literary genre in Czech literature: the literary collage. A distinction is made between collage, which denotes a literary technique, where elements adopted from elsewhere are integrated into a new context, and literary collage, where randomly compiled heterogeneous elements, adopted from authentic sources, are not united by the narrator’s points of view. The thesis also gives information about several other collage-like texts by Hrabal and about his picture-collage. The theory about the authenticity of the sources is based on an examination of several sources for the three texts and of Hrabal’s own excerpts, kept in the Literary Archive in Prague. The thesis also contains a structural and semantic analysis of those texts by Hrabal, which contain quotations from some of those sources. From this examination is apparent that Hrabal ties most of his texts together with the aid of recurrent motifs; that, in fact, he creates a large macrotext criss-crossed of reciprocal relationships. In most chapters in the thesis Hrabal’s connection with avant-garde is discussed.