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The Joke.
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Critical Essay by Clive Jordan
In Czechoslovakia it's still little more than a year since progressive writers like Milan Kundera were associated with Dubcek's noble attempt to build �...
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Critical Essay by Michael Berman
"The Joke"—a Czech novel that measures up to Czechoslovakia's wonderfully human films—is 40-year-old Milan Kundera's first no...
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Critical Essay by D.a.n. Jones
When a first-rate novel comes to us from Communist Europe, we do not want it sterilized and packaged; we want it raw. Last year, the Czechoslovakian author of The Joke w...
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Critical Essay by LubomÍr DoleŽel
A follower of the tradition of the multiperspective novel in modern Czech fiction, Kundera made a substantial contribution to the development of its dev...
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Critical Essay by Philip Roth
[Philip Roth is credited with bringing Kundera's works to the attention of the English-speaking public. The essay from which this excerpt is taken was originally p...
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Critical Essay by David Lodge
Twenty years ago, when the Critical Quarterly and I were young, and Milan Kundera was writing The Joke and wondering, no doubt, whether he would be allowed to publish it,...
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In the following excerpt, Wilhelmus evaluates "the new 'definitive' version" of The Joke in relation to contemporary history.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the animals say to ...
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Critical Essay by Clive Jordan
