Lenka Řezníková
Literary modernism and the truth behind hoaxes. The symbolist conception of hoaxes between gnoseological enthusiasm and epistemological skepticism
The 1890s placed new emphases with regard to models of hoax literary representations. Whereas in previous decades they were particularly staged as a social practice, at the turn of the century attention shifts into the sphere of aesthetics and the theory of knowledge. Mystification frees itself from existing ethical standards and is raised to a legitimate aesthetic and gnoseological category. This shift in the conception of hoaxes reflected the general rise in scepticism, which at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries cast doubt over the illusory obviousness of empirical evidence. Despite this epistemological scepticism, however, a new conception showed some gnoseological optimism, i.e. did not exclude the possibility of gaining knowledge as such. However it postulated knowledge of a new and unempirical kind reflecting the danger of delusion and in the words of Oscar Wilde, in which the hoax would in itself be the evidence.
Key words: symbolism – mystification – evidence – epistemology
design by Bedřich Vémola
