This department is currently engaged in research on three subjects. The first is the poetics of Czech poetry and prose, which is carried out primarily through research on verse (using a quantitative corpus-based approach; for more details, see Versological Team, below, which forms part of the department) and narrative (focusing on changes in narrative form in 19th century Czech prose). The second subject is the theory of literature, with a particular focus on the mediality of literature and intermedia relations (as in the monograph Visible Descriptions and Beyond the Horizons of the Medium: Literature and Mediality). The third subject involves mapping the development of Czech literary structuralism (Dictionary of Literary Structuralism, for instance).
The Department of Literary Theory was created in its current form at the beginning of 2009 by merging the Department of Text Poetics, which oversaw the extensive book project The Poetics of Literary Work of the 20th Century (2001–2005), with the Department of Prose Theory, which dealt with the development of narratology and its interpretive use. Members of the department hold conferences (Narrative and Narratology: Metamorphosing the Structures, and Quantitative Approaches to Versification), colloquia (Style and Poetics, and the Diachronic Narratology Workshop), participate in the making scholarship available to the general public (Czech Library Seminar, Science and Technology Week, School of Czech Language and Literature for Educators, and Science at Home).
The objective of the project is to create an interdisciplinary educational tool to provide a modern interactive introduction to Czech poetry and automatic text generation, as well as new possibilities for digital education in the current media environment.
