ČESKO-SLOVENSKÉ SPOLEČENSTVÍ NA PŮDĚ SOUČASNÉ FANOUŠKOVSKÉ LITERATURY. PŘÍPAD FANDOMU HARRY POTTER

The goal of the paper is to map the Czech-Slovak community in the field of contemporary fan fiction inspired by the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling as a follow-up to the tradition of research into the Czech-Slovak literary and cultural relations. It is built on the conception of a „peculiar literary community“ of the Czechs and the Slovaks formulated by Dionýz Ďurišin. What is then analysed is the space of Czech-Slovak websites administered by so-called fans for fans. The activities of the Czech-Slovak community in the field of fan fiction cannot be summarized easily due to several reasons including the fact that the relations within the community are continuously developing and changing. The existence of the Czech-Slovak literary community mainly influenced by nostalgia and personal mind sets of individual debaters is seemingly dominated by disruptive moments strongly motivated by rivalry between the two nations. That is mostly reflected in the debates about the Czech or Slovak translations of the original text. However, it is necessary to note that the community (so-called fandom) sees itself as Czech-Slovak and the most-visited websites are declared to be Czech-Slovak, too. Regardless of the most noticeable manifestations of non-togetherness, the fact that the common Czech-Slovak space exists, what´s more spontaneously, without any ideological prompting, and provides place for linguistic debates, actually gives witness to strong cultural togetherness. The paper does not only attempt to follow in the research tradition but also to shift the focus that has so far been given to high literature to popular literature and culture, which is the area where the Czech-Slovak community currently seems to be most active.