Milan Kundera Critical Essay | John O'Brien

John O'Brien

SOURCE: "Laughable Loves, " in Milan Kundera & Feminism: Dangerous Intersections, St. Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 79-87.

In the following essay, O'Brien singles out the stories "Hitchhiking Game" and "Edward and God" as illustrations of Kundera's "ability to expose the misogynistic male psychology. "

In The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon contends that the characteristic that defines a work as postmodern is not solely whether it can be praised for its critique of representation. Instead, she maintains that it is the combination of both complicity with dominant representational strategies and critique that makes a work postmodern. With this idea in mind, it is perhaps less strange to find that the stories that most challenge oppositional thinking in Kundera's collection of short fiction are two that... are among the most problematic in their treatment and representation of women. On closer scrutiny, "Hitchhiking Game" and "Edward and God" specifically dramatize alternatives to...
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