Bøger udgivet af Karolinum Press, Charles University

A look at the art of 1950s Europe as a shared set of remarkable artistic achievements. This book examines the visual arts of the 1950s in Europe in the most open perspective. It works with an awareness of the common historical framework of European culture, providing a basis for understanding art in a new way, opposing existing stereotypes. It deals with many hitherto neglected themes, within the framework of which Czech art also belonged in a broad international sociocultural context. The period of the 1950s is traditionally associated with the growing confrontational politics of the major power blocs, forcibly transforming the geographically close into the infinitely distant. Countering the Cold War tendency to highlight cultural division, this book views the artistic production of this period as a shared accomplishment. Challenging traditional art-historical approaches, it uses three selected phenomena--abstraction, realism, and international exhibitions--to search with faith in the power of artistic production across political regimes for obscured but vital layers of art that form a multifaceted, interconnected whole. Its aim is not to create further binding interpretations, but to create space for new questions and visual experiences. Its structure corresponds to this. The text, confronted with four hundred and fifty reproductions of works lying, often unnoticed, in depositories, is intended to convey impressive personal encounters to the reader and to display the unbreakable invincibility of the fundamental values of European culture.

Twenty years of lectures on the quantum world by an esteemed physicist. This book covers the material of the two-semester quantum field theory course that Jirí Horejsí has taught at Charles University and Czech Technical University in Prague for over two decades. In the individual chapters, one may find the discussion of selected topics in relativistic quantum mechanics and relativistic quantum field theory; the dominant theme is quantum electrodynamics. The technique of Feynman diagrams is described in detail, along with methods of regularization and renormalization, including some basic applications. The selection of topics presented in the book is intended to provide the reader with the technical skills necessary for the subsequent study of theoretical particle physics. In keeping with the author's typical lecture style, the text contains many detailed explicit calculations to a degree not entirely typical in other available sources. With primary appeal for university students specializing in theoretical physics or nuclear and particle physics, it may also be useful for any scientifically minded reader seriously interested in the foundations of modern physics.

Analyzes the historical significance of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. This book addresses different aspects of the Soviet army's twenty-year presence in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and 1991. It explores the circumstances of the Soviet settling in the country, immediately related to the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968; its active interference in the political developments in the early stage of the "normalization" era; and the universal support provided by the normalization era regime. It examines the darker side of this support when the constant favoring of Soviet interests--often to the detriment of the local population and the environment--went hand in hand with the resignation of the Czechoslovak state to lawfulness and the execution of effective administration on its territory. Based on extensive local and national primary sources, the volume describes the often problematic coexistence of the Soviet garrisons and local inhabitants, who did not have sufficient protection at the central level. In this context, it points out the contradictory logic that framed the mutual coexistence: the official policy of friendship on the one hand and the counter-intelligence protection of Soviet military premises on the other. Marie Cerná records the traces that the presence of the Soviet army left in the collective memory and examines the circumstances of its departure from the country in 1990 and 1991, which began immediately after the change of the political regime. She presents the long-term presence of the Soviet army as a fundamentally political and politicized matter, which was first the subject of power controversies and later of propaganda and intentional manipulation.

Contextualizes literary texts and other cultural artifacts generated using the latest technological techniques. The possibilities of generated cultural production have undergone fundamental changes in recent years, leading to a rethinking of existing approaches to the text and the artwork as such. To grasp this process, Zuzana Husárová and Karel Piorecký propose the term "neural network culture," which captures a wide range of generative practices and reception mechanisms. The Culture of Neural Networks contextualizes the phenomenon of literary texts and other artifacts generated using the latest technological techniques. The generation of literary texts using neural networks is part of a broader cultural process, to which this publication formulates a position through the lens of literary science, media theory, and art theory. The scholarly debate over this topic has been inconsistent--on the one hand, it underestimates the diachronic connections between generated texts and the tradition of experimental and conceptual literature; on the other hand, it does not sufficiently clarify the new-generation procedures and the contribution of human and technological actors in them. Therefore, Husárová and Piorecký propose the notion of synthetic textual art, which reflects the specific roles of the different actors involved in generative practice and its intermedial nature. In doing so, they approach the topic from both historical and theoretical perspectives, analyzing the current state of generative practice in all three basic literary types and in the intermedial space using selected foreign and Czech-Slovak projects. This state of affairs is often distorted in media discourse and even mythicized in terms of the capabilities of "artificial intelligence"; therefore, a critical analysis of this media discourse is essential. Finally, the authors summarize the implications of this stage in the development of generative practice on creativity theory and literary theory.

A new translation of a classic work of structuralist criticism. Originally published in 1931, Otakar Zich's Aesthetics of Dramatic Art laid the foundation for a systematic theory of modern theater and helped establish theater studies as an academic discipline. This volume is the first complete translation into any language and alongside Theatre Theory Reader: Prague School Writings provides thorough insight into Czech dramatic thought. Studying the theater from the audience's perspective, Zich argues that the distinctive basis of dramatic art is human interaction rather than imitation, communication, fiction, or performed dialogue, as other theorists have argued. Covering spoken drama and opera, Zich's Aesthetics of Dramatic Art is a foundational text of Czech theater practice that remains inspirational today for theater practitioners and theorists.

A necessary contemporary reframing of a classic nineteenth-century artist. Josef Mánes (1820-71) was a creator on whom the Czech revivalist society placed its hopes for the creation of a national art. Mánes was a painter, draftsman, decorator, author of models for applied art and architecture, and an enfant terrible of the domestic art scene. A disgraced artist but an entertaining companion, he was idealized and profaned in various cultural and political contexts. This volume offers a new perspective on a canonized figure, broadened by the varied voices and approaches of collective authors. Flying with Wax Wings explores the many depictions of Mánes, the result of the research of a collective of authors whose aim was to introduce the key personality of nineteenth-century Czech art in the context of contemporary European art and from the current position of today's art history. The result is, strangely enough, the first monograph on Josef Mánes that does not present a distorted picture of his life and work.

A reassessment of fundamental scholarship on the Middle Ages, based on previously unknown medieval written source material. Medieval peasantry represents a particularly attractive unknown for historians, as it is crucial for understanding both later economic growth and the surprising stagnation of some European regions. Our existing knowledge about the social structures and institutions of the medieval peasantry is incomplete, existing only in rough outlines. Almost nothing is known about their real inner dynamics and demographic aspects. This monograph takes on this challenge, taking advantage of the previously unnoticed preserved written sources of the Cheb city-state, a place unique in the European context. Drawing from this material, the book presents a remarkably detailed view of social mobility, migration, and the method of social reproduction of peasantry in the late Middle Ages, including new perspectives on the phenomenon of the disintegration of country settlements during that period.

A history of military-technological innovation in Russia. This book traces the dynamics of military-technological innovation in Russia over the last hundred and fifty years, particularly focusing on three distinct periods: the introduction of rifled breech-loading weapons in Imperial Russia in the nineteenth century, the invention of nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, and the development of precision-guided weapons in post-Soviet Russia in the twenty-first century. The analysis relies extensively on primary data obtained from Russian archives, complemented by a series of expert interviews, and deciphers Russia's distinct strategic cultural approach to military-technological innovation.

A new edition of a classic of Czech literature and literary comedy. Upon its initial publication in Czech in 1942, Saturnin was a bestseller. This is entirely appropriate, for while Saturnin draws on a tradition of Czech comedy and authors such as J. Hasek, K. Čapek, and K. Poláček, it was also clearly influenced by the English masters Jerome K. Jerome and P. G. Wodehouse. Saturnin is the story of a young man in love and his faithful servant Saturnin, who upsets the peaceful rhythm of his master's domestic arrangements and turns his life inside out. He lures him into an exotic world where he is forced to live dangerously, and he shows him how to cope with any situation. Saturnin lays bare the weaknesses of others and compels them to disclose their "true" nature--he is a subversive servant. Written at a time when Czechoslovakia was deep in the grip of the Nazi occupation, Saturnin showed how one form of resistance was to put the world created by invasion out of your mind and create another. However, so recognizably Czech was that "other" that its popularity did not diminish with the end of the war or, indeed, with the end of the forty years of communism that followed the war's end. The book has been adapted for radio and television, produced as a film, and has a regular place in the repertoire of the Czech stage.

The book focuses on probability metrics suitable for the characterization of random variables in Hilbert or Banach space. It provides details of various stochastic processes, such as testing non-deterministic statistical hypotheses, characterization of probability distribution or constructing multidimensional test for two selections. The book is published in the English language.