A “right to sadness”: late socialist environmentalism between technocracy and romanticism and the Czech nature writer Jaromír Tomeček

Title:

A “right to sadness”: late socialist environmentalism between technocracy and romanticism and the Czech nature writer Jaromír Tomeček

Creator:

Babička, Martin

Identifier:

https://cdk.lib.cas.cz/client/handle/uuid:cc218233-9d54-4cc2-96ad-c8b026706e24
uuid:cc218233-9d54-4cc2-96ad-c8b026706e24
doi:10.46957/con.2022.2.4

Subject:

environmentalism, late socialism, Czechoslovakia, socialist realism, and nuclear energy

Type:

model:article and TEXT

Format:

bez média and svazek

Description:

The article examines the works of nature writer Jaromír Tomeček, his public image, and his reception by literary theory and criticism as a distinctive late socialist response to environmental concerns. The article argues that the “ecological techno-optimism” of Jaromír Tomeček was representative of the late socialist reconsideration of human-nature relations that rejected the earlier modern understanding of humans as masters of nature and tried to find a new harmony between the two, but that also rejected the “pessimistic” perspective of Western ecology. Revising the tradition of socialist realism, late socialist literature allowed for sorrow over loss (“a right to sadness”) while still giving primacy to joy over progress, negating the “existential despair” of the 1960s. It thus preserved the progressive temporal orientation tied to the socialist ideal of increasing material wellbeing while trying to reconcile technocratic rationality with romantic subjectivity. “Ecological techno-optimism” eventually materialized in the form of the nuclear energy programme as the solution to the ecological crisis.

Language:

Czech

Rights:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
policy:public

Coverage:

67-90

Source:

Kontradikce: časopis pro kritické myšlení | 2022 Volume:6 | Number:2

Harvested from:

CDK

Metadata only:

false