On Saturday 11 November, 2006, the Department of English and American Studies of Ostrava University’s Faculty of Arts held a symposium dedicated to the legacy of one of the outstanding figures of both Czech and world linguistics, the distinguished Brno scholar Professor Jan Firbas. Professor Firbas was internationally renowned for his groundbreaking theory of Functional Sentence Perspective, and his contribution to Czech linguistics was immeasurable.

The symposium was attended by all the university professors of the English Language in the Czech Republic (with one abstention): Charles University, Prague (two), Masaryk University, Brno (one), Palacký University, Olomouc (two), and Ostrava University (two), plus a small group of Firbas’ close collaborators from Brno and Prague. Proceedings were chaired by Firbas’ student, colleague and disciple Professor Aleš Svoboda, Head of the Department of English and American Studies at Ostrava.

After an opening address by Eva Mrhačová, the Dean of Ostrava University’s Faculty of Arts, the symposium continued with a short commemoration of Professor Firbas’ life and work. Professor Aleš Svoboda briefly outlined Firbas’ distinguished career, recalling his outstanding qualities both as a scholar and as a man. The delegates jointly agreed on the wording of a letter to be sent to Professor Firbas’ widow Helena, expressing their warmest regards to her and their recognition of the lifelong support she gave to her husband.

The main part of the day’s proceedings turned its attention from the past to the future. Delegates discussed a proposal to publish Professor Firbas’ collected works in a format which would make them easily accessible to researchers and students. Currently, Firbas’ writings are scattered over a large number of different publications, many of which are now very difficult to find. In addition, some of the texts are only available in Czech, cutting them off from a wider readership. The planned project will address these disadvantages by gathering all of Firbas’ works together ‘in one place’ and producing English translations of his entire oeuvre. The publication is scheduled for 2011, in order to mark the 90th anniversary of Firbas’ birth.

The delegates expressed unanimous support for the proposal, and contributed a wide range of constructive suggestions and insights – both of a linguistic and a practical nature. Several participants undertook to carry out various preparatory tasks in order to facilitate the smooth running of the project. At the conclusion of the symposium, the delegates resolved to meet again at an appropriate juncture.

The organisers of the symposium would like to express their thanks and kind regards to all of the delegates.

BEYOND POSITIVIST HISTORY, “STRUCTURE OF DEVELOPMENT”

AND “HORIZON OF EXPECTATION”

Meeting of the European Network for Reception Studies,

Department of English and American Studies, Charles University in Prague

7 October 2006

Focusing on philosophical, aesthetic, historical and other aspects of the concept of period and the methods of periodization in literary and cultural studies the meeting will reinterpret their traditional uses, such as the assimilation of otherness and construction of continuity, and the more recent ones, for instance, the Prague School’s (Vodička’s) notion of “concretization” or Konstanz school’s (Jauss’s) “intersections of synchrony and diachrony” in the process of aesthetic experience. Confronting them with selected themes in the late twentieth-century philosophy (e.g., Foucault’s “episteme”, “discursive formation”, “archive”; Deleuze’s “event”, “repetition of difference”, “complication”, “fold”) and cultural history (e.g., Greenblatt’s “self-fashioning”, “negotiation”, “circulation”; Pratt’s “contact zones”), the meeting will consider the possibilities of periodization in contemporary theoretical and historical discourses and its functions in the process of shaping of individual and cultural memories.

The European Network for Reception Studies is funded by The British Academy and coordinated by

Dr. Elinor Shaffer, Director, Research Project Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, and

Professor Annick Duperray, Universtité de Provence, Aix-en-Provence and Marseille.

Programme

The keynote public lecture

“History without Periods: Dilemma or Deliverance?”

will be delivered by

Professor Randolph Starn

Department of History, University of California at Berkeley

ATTENTION! CHANGE OF THE VENUE!

Due to the construction works in the Main Building of the Faculty of Arts, the Meeting will take place in Room 138 (first floor), Celetna 20, Prague 1 (close to the Old Town Square - Staromestske namesti). There will be signs pointing to that room. The starting time remains the same.

Discussion after the lecture

will be opened by the responses of

Professor Thomas Glick (Department of History, Boston University)

Professor Robert Weninger (Department of German, King’s College, University of London)

Professor Martin Procházka (Department of English and American Studies,

Charles University, Prague).

The meeting will continue after lunch by a closed seminar session.

A series of lectures and seminars given by scholars from the University of Oxford will take place at The Faculty of Arts (Filozofická fakulta), Charles University Prague, námestí Jana Palacha 2, Praha 1 from 27 to 29 September 2006.

Programme

Heather O´Donoghue (reading list):

• “Northern Echoes in Beowulf” (lecture)
• “The Wife´s Lament and Old Norse Myth: A Voice from the Other Side?” (seminar)

Bernard O´Donoghue (reading list):

• “A Case for Courtly Love Again” (lecture)
• “Fixing the Medieval Lyric” (seminar)

Vincent Gillespie (reading list):

• “Chaucer and the Poetics of Stupidity” (lecture)
• “Meat, Metaphor and Mysticism” (seminar)

Terry Hoad (no preliminary reading required):

• “Old and Middle English Lexicography: Finished and Unfinished Business, and Business Not Yet Begun” (lecture)
• “Old and Middle English Poems and the Question of Meaning” (seminar)

More information and registration (till 10 September 2006) is available at http://oxford-prague.ff.cuni.cz