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Thinking Globally: Seamus Heaney and Dennis O'Driscoll
Zikmund, Jan ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Theinová, Daniela (referee)
In 2008, Dennis O'Driscoll published Stepping Stones, a book-length interview with the Irish poet and critic Seamus Heaney. When conducting the interview, O'Driscoll did not take a strictly chronological approach. Instead, he was interested in Heaney's literary influences, as well as his work and views on poetry. O'Driscoll's informed questions reflect his own thinking as both a poet and critic, and rather than playing the role of passive interlocutor, he confronts and challenges Heaney's views. The result is a discussion that is dynamic and revealing, providing insight into the minds of two significant Irish poets. The interview in Stepping Stones forms the basis of my bachelor thesis, which examines the friendship and exchange of influence between Heaney and O'Driscoll, who had known each other since the 1970s and had written essays on similar topics. My thesis focuses on three points of disagreement between Heaney and O'Driscoll: Eastern European poetry, American poetry and literary culture, and the poetry of last things. My aim is to introduce both poets' positions on each subject, and consider how their opposing views influenced each other's thinking on those subjects. The purpose of this thesis is to clarify why O'Driscoll was important to Heaney and explore how both poets influenced each...
The Portrayal of Women and Men in Charles Bukowski's Fiction
Valdajeva, Božena ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Quinn, Justin (referee)
The subject of the present thesis is the author Charles Bukowski and as the title suggests his portrayal of women and men in the chosen works. This thesis strives to avoid presumption of Bukowski's personal sentiments and views, and instead focuses on the written word itself, namely on the Notes of a Dirty Old Man and Women. By choosing Notes of a Dirty Old Man and Women we will be able to discuss changes in Bukowski's attitudes throughout a set period of his life, during a time when attitudes towards women were changing. The pillars of the thesis are language and sexuality. Hence, this thesis challenges the image of crude and basic language not being worthy of literary acceptance. This thesis will show that such language was chosen deliberately. It will be explained, for example, that one of Bukowski's reasons for doing so, was to better reflect the minds of his protagonists. Similarly, sexuality, as one of the most discussed and criticised of Bukowski's themes will also be analysed. The object of this academic discussion is to show how Bukowski liberated the subject of sexuality by using humour and irony in his writing. Consequently, the thesis will also contextualise Bukowski in terms of time, place and personal development, in order to show progress and development in his work. It will be shown...
T. S. Eliot and William Shakespeare: The Dynamics of Influence
Lakhno, Maryna ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
4 ABSTRACT T. S. Eliot once remarked: "I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem with other poems by other authors and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written."1 The interpretation of his poetry depends on literary tradition and its understanding. By alluding to dead authors, Eliot created an oeuvre that can be fully understood only through research. He also contrasts the contexts of the past and present, and reinforces the importance of borrowing in the creative process. One of the authors that recurs in Eliot's writing is William Shakespeare. Eliot paid tribute to the Elizabethan playwright through the use of dramatic monologue, quotations and allusions to his themes and motifs. In this way, he expresses his longing for English cultural heritage, as Shakespeare is a symbol of Englishness. This bachelor thesis explores the influence that Shakespeare had on both Eliot's literary criticism and poetry, primarily in the period from the 1910s to the 1930s. With especial emphasis on Hamlet and Coriolanus, the thesis explores those qualities which Eliot emphasized and which would prove important for his own work, above all "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock," The Waste Land and Four Quartets, as well as minor poems such as...
The poetic form of Sylvia Plath's early poems
Arutyunyan, Veronika ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Armand, Louis (referee)
This thesis is concerned with an analysis of selected early poetry of Sylvia Plath on the basis of the apprentice period, in which she often relied on traditional verse forms and was inspired by poetic influences. Plath's poetry is marked by a progress from experimental phase to mature, powerful poetry of controlled rhythm. In the introductory chapter, we are concerned with an elucidation of the major verse forms Plath employed repeatedly exemplified by several poems Plath wrote in her early twenties including the poems of The Colossus. The later poems discussed display an effort for a freer structure and flexibility. The second chapter focuses on the analysis of various poetic influences. Plath was immensely inspired by both her predecessors and contemporaries, which can be seen in her employment of poetic devices, diction and even themes. Plath's apparent meticulous practice and learning of the diverse traditional verse forms - for example the alliterative meter of Old English poetry - shall be examined in order to demonstrate the importance of this practice which later led to the poetry of high technical achievement. The third chapter provides a survey on elegy and its major function in the course of development and analysis of Plath's early elegies with reference to Peter Sacks' study The...
Feminism in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich: A Comparison of Her Early and Late Poems
Cimalová, Natalie ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Quinn, Justin (referee)
This BA thesis examines the development of feminism in the poetry of Adrienne Rich between the 1950s and the 1990s. Feminism in Rich's poetry took years to develop from strict formalism in the 1950s that only alluded to the unequal status of women in patriarchal society, to bold free verse and feminist attitudes in the 1970s, and finally to an engagement with marginalization of certain groups of people due to their race, nationality, class or religion. Rich examined the marginalization of women in society already in her first collection, A Change of World (1951), through poems such as "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" or "An Unsaid Word," which are characterized by the perfection of form. Formalism was still a prominent hallmark of the poems in Rich's second collection, The Diamond Cutters, and Other Poems (1955), but a certain loosening of Rich's style, deviations from the tight stanzaic structure and a bolder approach to criticizing male authority over women can be seen in these poems. This concerns for example poems "Living in Sin" and "Perennial Answer," which address traditionally assigned gender roles. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, there was a major change in Rich's poetry, because it became significantly radical both in terms of feminism and free-verse. This significant shift is most prominent in...
Issues of translation in Miroslav Holub's poetry
Prunarová, Markéta ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Delbos, Stephan (referee)
Miroslav Holub, the most translated of twentieth-century Czech poets, has an integral place in Anglophone literature, yet he has received little attention from Czech literary critics. The aim of this bachelor thesis is to shed light on questions that arise from this singular situation. First and foremost, in what ways and for what reasons has Holub's poetry become an integral part of the Anglophone tradition and what artistic features allowed its consolidation? This thesis explores the aspects of Holub's poems and of the cultural and political contexts that helped the positive reception of his work abroad. Since Holub's poetry engaged with the British and American literary tradition in its translated version, the main focus of this thesis is on the differences and similarities between the dynamics of Holub's oeuvre in the original and in English. The first part of the thesis introduces Holub's poetry from the Czech point of view. The genealogy of his work is outlined in its broader literary and social circumstances, especially within the context of the Poetry of the Everyday. To understand this context, a part of this chapter is dedicated to his biography. The core of the second chapter is the description of Holub's poetic language. This aims to determine whether such a language is suitable or...
Meze a jazyky v poezii současných irských autorek
Theinová, Daniela ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Pilný, Ondřej (referee) ; Campbell, Matthew (referee)
Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy v Praze DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Daniela Theinová LIMITS AND LANGUAGES in Contemporary Irish Women's Poetry "Irish poetry" is an inherently equivocal concept characterized by two fissures, one linguistic (Irish-English; standard English-Hiberno English) and the other chronological (oral-written; Old Irish-modern Irish). Central to my project is to show how this bifurcate cultural identity, prominent in Irish literature due to Ireland's history and the politicized concept of "national language," figures in poetry by Irish women of the last forty years. While I account for the significance of the hyphen in Anglo-Irish as well as in Gaelic-Irish poets, contradictory tensions are traced not only across and along the linguistic divide. In attending to the shift from feminism (Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paula Meehan, Medbh McGuckian, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill) to post-feminism in Irish poetry (Biddy Jenkinson, Vona Groarke, Caitríona O'Reilly, and Aifric Mac Aodha), I illustrate the role that the border between English and Irish has played in these processes. The dissertation falls into two parts each of which consists of two chapters. Part One explores some of the ways in which poets have confronted the inherited tradition and the feminine stereotypes therein. My...
The 'Butterfly' in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson
Hübnerová, Petra ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Quinn, Justin (referee)
A B S T R A C T This thesis explores the significance of the butterfly motif in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The first two parts form the theoretical background of the thesis, i.e. they deal with the life and poetry of Dickinson with focus on the poems on nature (and insects). The butterfly motif is introduced from the perspective of mythology in different cultures of the world and then within a framework of English and American literature. The practical part establishes, on the basis of the analysis of fifty poems in total, two main thematic areas: the butterfly as a symbol of beauty and the butterfly as a product (or part) of metamorphosis. In addition to emphasizing the individual thematic contexts in which the butterfly appears in Dickinson's poetry, the thesis also tries to determine the symbolic value of the motif in her verse.
The significance of female characters in Joseph Conrad"s novels Chance, Victory and The Rescue
Shumyk, Ganna ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Quinn, Justin (referee)
The main purpose of the present work is to analyse the role of female characters in Joseph Conrad's writing and consequently to challenge his conventional image of a misogynistic writer. Three novels of his late period are chosen for close reading and detailed examination: Chance, Victory and The Rescue. All the three novels belong to the late period of Conrad's literary career which has produced a contradictory critical reaction among Conradian scholars. According to some critics this period shows signs of decline of Conrad's genius. Others, however, observe the woman's question as a new concern of the writer. Thus, the second chapter of the thesis summarizes critical approaches to women in Conrad's late novels. It illustrates the way they have developed and transformed from the beginning of the twentieth century to the first decade of the twenty first century. The rest of the work is divided into three sections, each focusing on the analysis of one individual novel and its main female character. Each novel is considered separately in terms of its form and structure in order to demonstrate the way Conrad experiments with the genre of romance and other related forms. Consequently, we prove that he creates a parody of the genre and its effects. With the intention of determining the significance of...
Boland, McGuckian and Groarke: nature and the self in three contemporary Irish women poets
Skálová, Alena ; Wallace, Clare (advisor) ; Quinn, Justin (referee)
This thesis comprises historical and critical introduction to contemporary women's poetry in Ireland and close reading of three poets of its two latest generations, Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian and Vona Groarke. It focuses on her perception of nature and attitude to the relationship between the human self and natural processes and objects. The contextual background to my reading emphasizes the feminist critique of the traditional false images of the woman's self in Irish poetry and politics, and suggests new opportunities of the most recent female poetic voices. The culturally rooted simplifying or even harmful connection between femininity and the fertile land or Catholic ideals of virginity has provoked a lot of indignation among contemporary women poets, and caused abundant literary attempts of its re-negotiation. The authentic poetic representation of the woman's sexual and spiritual connection to the land and nature along with women's subjective use of nature imagery belongs to crucial points of this re-negotiation. It is pursued extensively in all of the poetesses discussed in this paper. My close reading considers the political objectives of the poems and notices different modes of their artistic response to the relevant cultural questions. Nevertheless, it emphasizes also the independence...

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