Daniela Hodrová and Tereza Boučková: On the Edge of Chaos

Daniela Hodrová and Tereza Boučková emerged as two of the most radical voices of the post-1989 generation of Czech authors. Through their distinct yet thematically intertwined approaches, both authors depict motherhood as an experience fraught with instability, ambiguity, and transformation. While prevailing narratives of post-socialist literature in East Europe emphasize the transgressive, raucous, and anarchic responses to the societal collapse of the 1990s, texts about motherhood—a topic perceived as sentimental, banal, and conservative—have received scant attention from scholars and critics. In this talk, I will demonstrate the centrality of pregnancy and motherhood to Hodrová’s and Boučková’s oeuvres and illuminate how these themes echo postmodernism’s interest in fragmentation, the body, and the instability of identity.

 

 

Mary Orsak is a DPhil Student in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford University. Her dissertation entitled “Mothers and Daughters: Contemporary Czech, Slovak, and Russian Women’s Literature” explores the representation of pregnancy, parturition, and parenthood in post-socialist literature. She is also the author of two recently published chapters on the author Milan Kundera, “An International Socialist Avant-Garde or the Western Canon: Kundera’s Early Reflections on World Literature” in Kundera Known and Unknown (Bloomsbury 2024) and “Kundera, Tolstoy, and the lightness of being” in Modern Czech Literature: Writing in Times of Political Trauma (Vernon Press 2024).