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"The Same River Twice": An Analysis of Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Steven Spielberg's Film Adaptation
Bularzová, Kristýna ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
1 Abstract As an African American writer and activist, Alice Walker explores themes related to the Black community and culture. In The Color Purple, she focuses on Black women and the struggles they had experienced in the rural American South between 1900s-1940s. Walker addresses issues such as domestic violence or oppression established by patriarchy, and through the female characters also elaborates on female identity, sexuality, and spiritual freedom. In 1985, The Color Purple was adapted into a film of the same name by Steven Spielberg. This BA thesis first introduces Alice Walker and her work in the historical and literary context, and then provides a general introduction to the concept of film adaptation. This chapter briefly clarifies the term and then comments on different types of film adaptation, the process of its creation, and the importance of the adaptation's reception from the public, for that is considered to be a crucial and final part of the overall process. Lastly, it discusses the transition from a novel to a film specifically, which leads the reader to the core of this treatise: the detailed analysis of Walker's novel and Spielberg's interpretation of the story. The BA thesis studies the differences between the two works. It examines the key discrepancies in the depiction of characters,...
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Forms of Alienation and Loss in Hemingway's Texts
Rücklová, Alžběta ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
20th century was one of the most tumultuous periods in the human history. The fast-paced changes, innovations and progress, and the deadly, violent conflicts such as World War I shattered many illusions and marked future generations. The divide between the old and the new world became irreconcilable, because the old beliefs had been killed on the battlegrounds of Belgium and Italy. A member of such generation that had a first-hand experience was one of the most important and successful American writer Ernest Hemingway. A literary behemoth of the 20th century, Hemingway's work reflects his time; it is full of loss and sorrow young people of the war generation had to suffer. Many of his novels and short stories discuss the state of the world and how a person can find their place in it, how to cope with what had been and with what is to come. Furthermore, he analyses the relationships between friends, men and women, between individual and society, looking for answers to elementary human questions. How does one establish their own place in the world? What love looks like and how such relationship works? What is one's purpose in life? How to cope with loss and suffering? In his texts Hemingway portrays the protagonists in various life situations and plots, but many share a common experience, such as the...
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The Problematics of Race in Selected Writings of Toni Morrison
Staňková, Klára ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
The objective of this thesis is to examine the major writings of Toni Morrison which addressed the issues of race and the outcomes of racial discrimination such as for instance dehumanization through slavery or destruction of identity. The works chosen are mostly Toni Morrison's later novels such as Paradise, A Mercy and God Help the Child. Other crucial writings by Morrison concerned with the problematics of race are discussed as well. The analysis focuses on her oeuvre exploring black identity and experience (particularly the experience of African American women) in the United States as well as on the views on race and racial prejudices. In the introduction, the construction of race and racism is discussed in the context of American history. The analysis of the most pivotal historical moments, such as the enactment of the hereditary slavery law of 1662 in Virginia or the civil rights movement in the 1960s, reveals various issues stemming from the institutionalised racial discrimination such as disenfranchisement, anti-miscegenation laws or racial segregation. The subsequent subchapters encompass the definition of race, highlighting a scientific discovery by Stephen Oppenheimer, which proves that all humans have one common birthplace in Africa. This research demonstrates that race is not a...
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Agents without Agency: A Study of Archetypes and Society in Works of Edith Wharton
Milotová, Simona ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
The primary focus of this thesis is the New York fiction by the prolific American writer Edith Wharton. The particular works discussed in this thesis are The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, completed by the collection of four novellas, Old New York, and also a selection of Wharton's short stories set in the city of New York. The main argument of the thesis could be encapsulated to say that Wharton's fiction lacks the individuality of the characters, and the main focus of the texts is on society and how society affects the archetypes of the characters created solely for the purposes of this thesis. It is divided into three intersecting chapters, the first topical chapter concentrating on New York as such and how the Gilded Age influenced the Big Apple. Moreover, Wharton and her own relationship with the city is discussed in this chapter as well, pointing at the fact that she was intimately familiar with the custom and the manners of the upper society of New York, which she later implemented in her fiction. Also, the description of naturalism and determinism are provided as those seem to be the genres most utilized by the author. The next chapter revolves around the notion of archetypes as Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced in his "The Structural Study of Myth," which...
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Contemporary revaluation of southern local color fiction
Pegues, Dagmar ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee) ; Ewell, Barbara Claire (referee)
The objective of this study is to offer an examination of the works of Kate Chopin and Grace King, representatives of the genre of Louisiana "Local Color" fiction, and to introduce a new perspective on their fiction that is equally distanced from the national/local dichotomy and the feminist interpretative framework. This study interrogates selected aspects of the category of race in the fiction of Kate Chopin and Grace King in order to reclaim the importance of race for regional Aesthetics and to offer an alternative view on the existing interpretations that emphasize the feminist themes of their fiction and, ultimately, to expand such interpretations. A replacement of the existing theoretical frameworks applied to the works of these two authors by postcolonial theory offers a new perspective on the category of race in their fiction without reducing its complexity and interconnection with the category of gender and region. As a result, the insight into the formation of region-specific racial knowledge testifies to the complexity of the issue of race within the framework of Local Color fiction. The focal point of this examination is the representation of racial stereotypes in the fiction of Chopin and King.
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Ongoing Queerness: The Flourishing of Trans Women's Literature in North America
Rose, Jamie ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
(English) This master's thesis describes how, within the space of a single decade (2010-2019), transgender women's literature underwent significant development when it came to the production of novels and literary production more broadly. Written to be accessible to those unfamiliar with transgender literature and the internal workings of trans communities as possible, this thesis begins by describing in detail the socio-political changes in how trans people lived and were perceived over the past decade, with particular attention paid to the changes in the media landscape, the recent surge of people coming out as transgender and the conservative backlash. Methodologically, this thesis utilises the viewpoint of transgender studies, which focuses to the material and socio-political conditions that facilitate trans cultural production and the ways in which trans literature engages with the politics of representation through the act of self- representation. It should be noted that this thesis only considers physically published literature written by trans women - a restriction that, the author acknowledges, helps reinforce the hegemony of the publishing industry - with special attention paid to the genre of the novel, and does not view works by cisgender authors that deal with transgender themes as...
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Objectivity Disguised: Ideas of Authenticity in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster
Torčík, Marek ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Robbins, David Lee (referee)
This thesis deals with six texts by two of the best-known contemporary American novelists, namely Paul Auster and Thomas Pynchon. The thesis analyzes three most recent novels by each writer: Invisible, Sunset Park and 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster and Against the Day, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon. All six novels explore various modes of authenticity - a notion which in each author's work adopts specific mechanisms of establishing ways of existing within the world that are directed towards a critique of the forms of society that try to limit individuals, confine them to prescribed objective categories. Chapters I to IV establish one by one the primary approaches to understanding how authenticity works within individual novels. First two chapters explore Paul Auster's works, and emphasize their portrayal of change as an organizing leitmotif. Chapters III and IV deal with selected works by Thomas Pynchon and analyze their use of entropy and information overload within individual narratives. The final chapter then combines all these notions and provides a comparative analysis and a critical interpretation of all six works against a theoretical and critical framework. The thesis explores the differences between Auster's and Pynchon's approach to authenticity, notions of the subjective or the...
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Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain and René Daumal's Mount Analogue: From Pataphysics to Power
Kulbashna, Darya ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
The thesis departs from the undetermined relation between René Daumal's unfinished novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing (1952) and its alleged adaptation, Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 film The Holy Mountain. The thesis discusses the two works from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis, specifically, through the lens of the so-called Borromean knot that represents the three functions of the psyche: the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. The structure of the thesis supposes the following: the first chapter concentrates on the relevant terminology and aims to define such concepts as language and ideology for the purposes of the present thesis; the second chapter discusses the method of analysis that will be applied to Daumal's Mount Analogue and Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, namely, it explores the possibilities of psychoanalysis and considers the 'unscientific' approach of pataphysics that favours the particular over the general; through the concept of the sinthome the aspect of action is emphasized in the analysis of Mount Analogue, while the fourth chapter analyses The Holy Mountain from the perspective of the 'hypertrophied' Symbolic and simultaneously stresses the importance of the element of balance in the film; the final chapter,...
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Getting the Picture: An Analysis of Narrative in E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel
Beňadiková, Jana ; Delbos, Stephan (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
American novelist E. L. Doctorow proclaimed in his essay, "False Documents," that there is no fiction or nonfiction, only narrative. A similar notion can be discerned also in Doctorow's novelistic oeuvre, which articulates the author's meditations on narrative. This thesis analyzes the particular manifestation of Doctorow's meditative concern for narrativity within his 1971 novel, The Book of Daniel, inspired by the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The thesis argues that The Book of Daniel explores the role of narrativity in informing modes of thought and systems of interpretation of the world by deconstructing and drawing attention to the process of construing a narrative in an epistemological enquiry into its potential to impart knowledge, problematizing this notion simultaneously by exposing the inherent artificiality of every and any narrative stemming from the fact that it is always manipulated, and consciously construed a certain way. This exploration of the nature and role of narrativity is realized in the novel on the level of plot by the protagonist's epistemologically motivated deconstruction of the official historical account of the Cold War political trial of his executed parents and of other, alternative accounts surrounding the case. This deconstruction ultimately demonstrates that...
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The American Notion of Freedom: Freedom as a Central Element of American History and its Reflection in Literature.
Tomášková, Barbora ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
This thesis explores the American notion of freedom and its interpretations within individual periods of American history. In the thesis, freedom is described upon the basis of historical context, and its importance is demonstrated through specific examples of the periods' literary works and documents. The work analyzes periods from 1776; the year of the U.S. establishment, and continues up to the first half of the twentieth century. For the purpose of the thesis, six particular periods characteristic of significant historical events, or, of social, literary, and philosophical movements, were chosen. Chronologically, the thesis begins with the 17th century's arrival of the first European settlers to the North American continent, followed by the founding of the United States more than a century later. The thesis then gradually focuses on movements and philosophies emerging during the 18th and 19th century, namely, transcendentalism and abolitionism, and further continues with introducing the freedom-related ideals of American anarchists and pragmatists. The work then closes with the 20th century's Beat generation. The objective of the thesis is to prove, that during American history, freedom had always been the most important value; a value which shaped the American mentality into how we know it...
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