'Identity - konstrukce, subverze a absence'

On 13 December 2013, the members of the 9th Charles University Programme of Research Development (“Literature and Art in Intercultural Contexts”) held their first joint workshop. The chosen topic was the problem of identity, understood as a construction, regarded from the point of view of its subversive nature and also from the perspective of its absence as a typical cultural distinctive agent. The programme was divided into three blocks. The first of them, defined by the themes researched inside the module “Transformations in the Cultural History of Anglophone Countries: Identities, Periods and Canons”, included three lectures. In the initial one, entitled Projections of Celtic Identity: Enlightenment, Romantism, Modernism, three projections of Celtic identity were compared by Martin Procházka: the call for language and cultural emancipation of the Scottish and Irish Gaels in the introduction to the 1751 collection of Gaelic poetry by Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (Alexander MacDonald), in which Enlightenment philology and antiquarianism are confronted with the political and cultural consequences of recent events (the suppression of the last Jacobite rising); the ‘invention of Celtic history'in the Ossianic poetry of James Macpherson, whose last epic Temora significantly rewrites Irish mythology and creates an image of Celtic and Norse antiquity rivalling the Classical one; and finally the project of Celtic art as an alternative to Scottish provincialism and nationalism, as well as to global capitalism and totalitarian communism in the poetry and essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, written among others under the influence of James Joyce. These projections were then further confronted with two imperial notions of identity – the British notion in Matthew Arnold's book On the Study of Celtic Literature and the Slavic one in the culture of the Czech national revival. The main theoretical/methodological feature is the confrontation of the notion of “imagined communities” according to Benedict Anderson with various concepts of empire and globalization. Ondřej Pilný in his contribution The Politics of Celtic Identity in the 19th Century in the British Isles and Central Europe draws from the work of the theorist of nationalism Joep Leerssen, who persuasively argued that already in the early 1820s, Europe was dominated by the essentialist concept of nation seen as a whole characterized by “cultural and moral DNA” derived via its ethnic origin. Celtic nations, or their identities constructed in this manner, offer an especially interesting matter for study as it seems that their principal features remain the same despite the wide difference of context in which the notion of “Celts” is treated in the course of the 19th century. The specific aim of the contribution is to trace how in the 1840s and 50s, Karel Havlíček Borovský in his texts on Ireland and on the leader of the Catholic Emancipation movement, Daniel O'Connell, draws from the writings of the German liberal Jakob Venedey; both use the example of the Irish Celts in the arguments against authoritative political regimes, but Havlíček, in an effort to further national emancipation, makes an analogy between the Celts and the Slavs. Both build on the stereotypical definition of the Celtic character, which circulated in the 19th century throughout the whole of Europe: we find it in the work of the first Irish folklore collectors (Thomas Crofton Croker) as well as in the crucial text by the French thinker of Breton origin Ernest Renan, The Poetry of Celtic Races (1859), later elaborated by Matthew Arnold in his highly influential Oxford lectures published in 1867 under the title On the Study of Celtic Literature. Its roots can be found, however, in the cultural context of 18th century Scotland, influenced by the Ossianic forgeries of James Macpherson. The contribution of Radvan Markus analyses the satirical novel An Béal Bocht by Myles na