Poetics of Names of Drama Characters in Czech Theatre of the Absurd

The paper deals with the poetics of the theatre of the absurd which in the Czech environment flourishes especially in the 1960s. Attention is paid primarily to the function of proper names in Czech original plays which can be ranked among the genre of the absurd, but also in the texts which employ only some features out of the rich scale the theatre of the absurd embodies. The paper analyses names of characters within a selected sample of 30 plays by 15 authors taking into consideration their multiple functions: identification, aesthetic function, classification, characterisation and association. It tries to show that a name of a character makes part of the poetics of the genre, plot and semantic structure of the work as a whole.

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