Essay

“Refusal of the body was, in the past, often related to the fact that the body as such resists the Logos, cannot be grasped by conceptual thinking.” Essays on corporeality and basic human movements (“Distractedness”, “Stumbling”, “Swinging”), on the futility of self-confidence and the most ordinary things (“Chairs”, “Junk”) or on the absence of ideas and spiritual exhaustion (“Discourse on Impermanence”). Twenty-eight texts by a prose writer, literary scholar and translator, Daniela Hodrová (1946) demonstrate the author’s special position in contemporary Czech literature. The impossibility of precisely defining her work due to the frequent blending of prose, essays and expert studies categorises her as postmodern, which places increased demands on the reader (e. g. a trilogy of novels Trýznivé město). In 2011, she received the State Prize for Literature for her novel Vyvolávání and then in 2012, she was granted the Franz Kafka Prize for her life’s works.