2025/12/30 by Ilona Gwóźdź-Szewczenko, Gwóźdź-Szewczenko, Ilona
Social Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Central European national history #Cinema and Media Studies #European Linguistics and Anthropology
paper · doi:10.34616/ajmp.2025.28.6
This article is devoted to the prose of the Czech writer – Vladimír Páral. It examines his novels written during the era of real socialism, as well as those created before and after the transformation of the political system, through the lens of representations of eroticism and sex. It describes the transformation that took place in the literary presentation of these aspects in Páral’s work and defines it as a characteristic shift from erotography (in his early writings) to pornography (from the 1990s onwards). The article is intended as a reconnaissance, a commentary on the transformation of socio-cultural mores as reflected in literary texts. The erotic scenes found in Páral’s prose are a valuable record of the changes in morals that have occurred over the decades, revealing the shifting boundaries of permissible expression under prevailing censorship. This does not, of course, imply that the sexual themes depicted in the Czech writer’s prose constitute a direct testimony to the sexual life of Czechoslovakia at the time, or of the Czech Republic thereafter. The author draws on Michel Foucault’s discourse on sexuality, particularly his concept of scientia sexualis. Unlike erotic art, which foregrounds the aesthetic and personal experience of sexuality, scientia sexualis examines sex as a biological and social phenomenon, often from the standpoint of an objective observer.