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How Language and Nation Interwine: Changes in the Language of Australian Literature from 1830 up to the Present
Císlerová, Magdalena ; Čermák, Jan (advisor) ; Willoughby, Louisa (referee) ; Horáková, Martina (referee)
While previous research has explored the relationship between national identity and language in Australia, it has not been examined on language data through history. This dissertation thus aims to trace linguistic manifestations of emerging local identity on a corpus of canonical Australian literature from 1830 up to the present. The corpus is divided into four periods based on the stages of development of postcolonial Englishes as per Schneider's Dynamic model (2007). The central hypothesis is that local identity manifests linguistically in an increased presence of the vernacular and domestic frames of reference in periods of heightened nationalism. Consequently, the nature of this study is interdisciplinary, combining linguistics with literary and cultural studies to offer a complex picture of the relationship between language and identity via a quantitative as well as qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis concentrates on keywords, exploring both keywords generated from the corpus, using an analogically created corpus of British literature as reference, and culturally significant keywords, following Wierzbicka's (1997) theory of every culture having a set of keywords that reflect its core values. The generated lists reflect the socio-historical and cultural context, revealing common...
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American English in Czech Middle Schools in Relation to Sociolinguistic and Cultural Preferences of the Students
Svatoňová, Karolína ; Luef, Eva Maria (advisor) ; Císlerová, Magdalena (referee)
This thesis examines the relationship between linguistic and cultural preferences of Czech students in the 8th and 9th grades of elementary schools. Its hypothesis claims that today's students are still strongly influenced by the Czech education system that places great emphasis on the instruction of British English, and therefore students prefer British lexical forms. However, it is also assumed that, due to the strong cultural influence of the United States, the students will be more familiar with American cultural phenomena and they will prefer them over British culture. As a part of the research for this thesis, an online questionnaire was administered to 215 students. This questionnaire contained questions related to both linguistic and cultural topics and its results confirmed the hypothesis. Most of the students tend to use British vocabulary even though they proved to have a deeper knowledge of American culture, preferring it over the British one. Some differences were recorded between genders; females are more inclined to prefer British English and culture than males. Simultaneously, those students who evaluated themselves as good at English and also have a better relationship with this language seem to prefer American forms and culture. The vast majority of this thesis aligns with the...
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Representation of gender in fiction: collocations of selected nouns and adjectives in English
Tvrdíková, Štěpánka ; Šebestová, Denisa (advisor) ; Císlerová, Magdalena (referee)
This bachelor's thesis focuses on the representation of gender in fiction based on an analysis of a sample of collocations of the nouns girl and boy and the adjectives girlish and boyish in English. The thesis attempts to show whether there is a tendency towards a more balanced representation of boys and girls in contemporary British fiction or whether they are represented stereotypically. The theoretical part defines the theoretical framework of collocation and semantic preference. Furthermore, it introduces approaches to the study of language in terms of gender, primarily focusing on the issue of linguistic sexism and the representation of gender in written texts across genres. The empirical part is based on the analysis of data drawn from the British National Corpus's fiction texts. The obtained data will be analysed using the corpus manager Sketch Engine, which allows examining the frequencies and the nature of differences and similarities of the way the selected lemmas are displayed. By means of Sketch Engine, the thesis also uncovers whether the differences and similarities in the representation of selected lemmas' collocations form a pattern with other word forms in different grammatical relations. The analysed data from the British National Corpus' fiction texts will then be divided per...
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Blurring the Lines between Reality and Fiction: Peter Carey's Engagement with Australian History and Identity
Císlerová, Magdalena ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
This thesis is concerned with the analysis of Peter Carey's portrayal of Australian history in his novels Illywhacker (1985), Oscar and Lucinda (1988), True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), and My Life as a Fake (2003), while also taking into consideration the travel memoir 30 Days in Sydney (2001). Carey approaches Australia's past critically and offers a playful rewriting of the "official accounts", striving to give voice to the marginalised, thus offering alternative versions not only of Australian history, the resulting national identity. This thesis first locates Carey within the historical novel tradition, and considers his rewritings from the perspective of postcolonialism, postmodernism and transnationalism. From the point of view of postcolonialism, Carey's novels serve as a tool of asserting the former colony's independence from the power of the metropolitan Centre over discourse. Postmodernism and its relativisation of established concepts and the blurring of boundaries provide Carey with narrative strategies such as unreliable narrators, historiographic metafiction, and multiple perspectives, which are examined in terms of how Carey employs them to call attention to the unreliability of historical sources, and by extension meaning and reality itself, to inspire a critical approach to...
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Free of Inhibitions and Full of Pleasure: The Image of Europe in the Works of James Salter
Císlerová, Magdalena ; Delbos, Stephan (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
This thesis is concerned with the analysis of the image of Europe in the novels of James Salter, namely A Sport and a Pastime (1967), Light Years (1975), Solo Faces (1979) and All That Is (2013), while also taking into account Salter's memoir Burning the Days (1997). In Salter's fiction and non-fiction, Europe is presented as a place of freedom, culture, tradition, romance and possibilities, to which all of Salter's main characters - and Salter himself - are drawn at some stage in their lives, often at turning points. The journey to Europe serves various functions: it provides education and enables release from the domestic environment through a metaphorical conquest of the Continent. This thesis explores the motivations of Salter's characters for the journey, their expectations, as well as their actual experience, and the impact of their experience in Europe within the framework of the tradition of American writing in Europe, particularly modernism, with whose adherents Salter shares not only a similar notion of Europe, and particularly Paris as the cultural capital, but also a similar outlook on life, and a number of important themes and stylistic features. In positioning Salter as a belated modernist this thesis draws on Pascale Casanova's theory of the workings of the literary world expressed...
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