Pražská mandala Daniely Hodrové

In his review of Daniela Hodrová’s Citlivé město: Eseje z mytopoetiky (2006), Jiří Pelán states that this is no typical work of literary studies concerned solely with the semiotics of the city, but a book in which, apart from other things, the author herself is a topic. It is, he argues, a ‘polymorphous, bewitching, even brilliant kaleidoscope of a book’. The reviewer admits that he was at first surprised that Hodrová has selected for ‘reading the city’ (that is, for understanding and perceiving the space of the town by means of a literary text) not only well-known authors, but eventually he found that his reservations were unjustified. In conclusion he states that although this may not be a volume intended solely for literary scholars, they too will find a great number of riddles in it to interest them, ‘for example, dozens of minute analyses of concrete texts, essays on the mythologization and remythologization of the image of the city, and on relations between various urban texts’.