The Mystery in the Image. Czech Writers Solving Crimes in the Art World

Abstract

The structural parameters for crime literature have been the subject of numerous overviews, critical essays, and recapitulations. Yet the renaissance of this literature unfolding today calls for new interpretations. To be more specific, this renaissance takes place in a climate of postmodern penchants for popular narrative and structural schemas, a blending of genre categories, and a predilection for heterogeneous discourses. This very fact should compel us to reflect on the factors contributing to the thriller’s appeal as a genre form that writers so often evoke to provide the reader with a fictional and “deep” statement on the various deficits of the contemporary world.  In Czech literature, prose writers such as Roman Ludva and Miloš Urban have taken cues from Umberto Eco and Dan Brown’s tendencies to experiment with well-worn narrative strategies, as well as their local tradition (the tales of the 19th-century neoromantic Jakub Arbes). Following suit, Ludva and Urban embed the templates of the thriller in a broadly organized interrogation of the contemporary condition of art. Simultaneously, using the strategy of “amplified” intersemiosis, they impart an autothematic dimension to their narratives.