ABSTRACT
In his chapter, “Eternal Return and the City/Country Dynamic in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being ,” Adam McKee establishes an unlikely connection between the well-known Nietzschean themes present in the novel and the classic ideology-critique and historical examination urban and rural forms in Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City . McKee argues that Kundera confronts the split between the country and the city from the standpoint of a Central European nation bound up in totalitarian, Soviet-communist rule, rather than through the standpoint of Williams’s capitalist England, thus inverting or subverting the binary distinction. While many critics have responded to Kundera’s somewhat flawed engagement with philosophical issues in the text, McKee notes, few have addressed the way in which the discourses contribute to the specific engagement the country/city divide in the novel, which describe the ideologically saturated geographies of the Czech countryside and Soviet Prague. In the end, McKee argues, Kundera and Williams deconstruct this country/city binary by showing the inherent instability in both categories and their most common conceptualisations.
