Čapek, Hašek, Kafka a (nejen) komiks

The doctoral thesis Čapek, Hašek, Kafka, and (Not Only) Comic Book is an interdisciplinary study situated at the intersection of corporeal narratology, adaptation studies, and comics studies. It focuses on the transpositions and transformations of the principal protagonists of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920), Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War (1921–1923), and Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1926) over the course of their more than century-long history. The selection of these three Prague authors is based on thematic features shared across their works, particularly the motifs of alienation and dehumanization, and the ambivalent position of the body amid the social, political, and cultural upheavals that followed the First World War. In comics studies, attention is often focused on the empty spaces between panels (Gutters), where meaning emerges through the reader’s active participation. This work seeks to move beyond these empty spaces by interpreting the visual representation of literary characters. Drawing on Daniel Punday’s theoretical framework, it understands the body as a constitutive element of narrative, while also treating it as a discursive and culturally constructed entity whose meaning changes according to its historical, social, and media context. The human body is therefore regarded as an active producer of meanings and images. Each text is approached as a “somatic lever” through which sensory experience is transmitted from the author to the recipient. This mode of interpretation makes it possible to uncover the authors’ embodied experience and its potential significance for the creative process itself. In its analytical approach to adaptations, the dissertation introduces the concept of “format fidelity” as an alternative to fidelity criticism. The individual case studies, therefore, take into account both the formal characteristics of the particular comics format and the historical context in which the adaptations under examination were produced. Inspired by Pascal Lefèvre, Jan Baetens, and Robert Stam, this approach enables examination of the expressive potential of comics in accordance with the specific demands and affordances of the medium, without subordinating the comic adaptation to its literary source. The research concludes that the body can function as a hermeneutic key, enabling the historical distance between the original literary work and its contemporary recipient to be bridged. Comics adaptation thus emerges as a valuable means of understanding cultural values as they are shaped within a particular historical context. The research findings offer a new perspective on the possible circumstances in which the works under examination were created, as well as on how the forms assumed by the protagonists’ bodies and non-bodies have changed across different cultural and temporal contexts. The research project presents a comprehensive methodology for analyzing adaptations of classical works that extends beyond comics alone. The individual studies demonstrate that a comics adaptation is an autonomous work of art which, when placed in dialogue with its source, can reveal new layers of meaning and generate new interpretative insights. The analysis of the selected adaptations and the methodological conceptualization of the body make it possible to trace manifestations of corporeal awareness in the works of Karel Čapek, Jaroslav Hašek, and Franz Kafka and to uncover their implicit emphasis on the significance and importance of every individual body. This aspect often remains concealed within their texts—much like the body in Cubist painting.