Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture — Special Issue on Czech Literature by Robert B. Pynsent
Published 1991 · 80,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture — Special Issue on Czech Literature to read?
Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture — Special Issue on Czech Literature scores 67 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Requires some familiarity with Central European cultural and political history.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Moves between high-level cultural claims and specific textual evidence.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- Packed with literary, historical, and cultural reference.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Academic argument throughout; organization is essayistic rather than schematic.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- National and cultural symbols are central objects of analysis.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Pynsent's approach shares something of the ironic detachment he describes in Czech culture.
- Resolution withholding: 18 out of 100
- The question of identity is left productively open.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Essay collection with a cumulative argument about Czech literary identity.
How Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture — Special Issue on Czech Literature is regarded
Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture — Special Issue on Czech Literature holds a literary regard score of 52 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.