The bourgeois subject in a workers' strike : strike in dramas from Czech lands around 1900

Vol.27,No.1(2024)

Jan Budňák

https://doi.org/10.5817/BL2024-1-3

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/digilib.80194

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Abstract
The paper examines whether there are signs of what, in accordance with Andreas Reckwitz's book Das hybride Subjekt, can be called a crisis of bourgeois (or civic) subjectivity ("das bürgerliche Subjekt") in workers' dramas with the theme of the strike around 1900. According to Reckwitz, this anthropological ideal, which combines the idea of (self-)perfectibility with the claim to a deep inner experience of the human being, reached a hegemonic position in the second half of the 19th century. One of the spheres of crisis of this ideal after 1900, according to Reckwitz, is the industrial environment, where there is a massification, a socialization of subjectivity at the expense of the bourgeois idea of its individual self-determination. The paper analyzes three strike dramas from the Czech lands around 1900 (Philipp Langmann, Karel Želenský, Jaroslav Zyka-Borotínský) in the context of literature with a working-class theme. It concludes that Želenský and Borotínský in particular depict the workers not as a desired new model of post-bourgeois subjectivity, but rather as an easily influenced and potentially violent crowd. In all three dramas, then, the working-class protagonist is conceived as a nineteenth-century bourgeois subject, that is, as a deeply moral, self-reflexive individual, and as such as an exception to his own social milieu.

Keywords:
workers; mass; literary modernism; crisis of the subject; German literature from the Czech lands

Pages:
38–50
References

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