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by Karen Von Kunes (Editor)
This collection of essays offers crucial and luminous insights into one of the best-known Czech authors, Milan Kundera, including his lesser known works.
With essays that focus on Kundera's poetry and plays, his last four novels written in French, and his nonfiction writings on the novelistic form and translation, Milan Kundera Known and Unknown explores the complex and productive career of this globally recognized author. The approach begins by examining Kundera's distinctive literary style, and then how his voice radiated outward from the small communist country of Czechoslovakia to the world. Starting as a poet and playwright, Kundera transcended the Czech literary scene and rose to global prominence with his novelistic style of variations, paradoxes, humor, and clairvoyance into human relationships mixed with political tensions. His multi-dimensional existential topics introduced complex novelistic characters that have reached a large audience and remain evocative. Kundera also critically commented on creative works - his own and of others - thus contributing a unique approach to a specific aesthetic ideal and within the masterworks of world-renowned authors. Chapters on Kundera's aesthetics and form, his philosophical leanings, his relationship to the burgeoning concept of "world literature," and translations of his writings offer new perspectives on his life's work. These insights shed light on Kundera's understudied works, such as his early poetry and his recent French novels, making connections between his early and later writing, and cementing his literary legacy for English-language audiences.Author Biography
Karen von Kunes is Assistant Professor teaching Czech and Slovak literature, film, and Czech language in the Department of Slavic & East European Languages & Cultures at the University of Toronto, Canada. Previously, she taught at Yale University, Harvard University, and the University of Texas, among other institutions. In addition to her many awards and publications, von Kunes belongs to the Circle of Scholars at Salve Regina University and is a Jonathan Edwards College Fellow at Yale University. Her most recent publications include Milan Kundera's Fiction: A Critical Approach to Existential Betrayals (2019) and Czech: An Essential Grammar (2021, co-authored).
