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Behind Enemy Lines: The New American Poetry and the Cold War Anthology Wars
Delbos, Stephan ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee) ; Harris, Kaplan (referee)
Behind Enemy Lines: The New American Poetry and the Cold War Anthology Wars The New American Poetry, a poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen and published by Grove Press in 1960, is perhaps the single most influential American poetry anthology in history. It not only brought some of the most important poets of the 20th century to international prominence, but it also created an editorial model that numerous prominent future anthologists would follow, and helped establish the image of American poetry as divided between competing camps of free verse and formal poets, or rebellious and academic poets, battle lines that were drawn when the anthology was published. At the same time, Allen's anthology established the United States as the center and the source of innovative anglophone poetry, despite the fact that such poetry was being written in numerous English-speaking countries during the post-war period. The origins and the legacy of this important anthology are complex, and have deep resonances in the way we think about poetry even today. Considering these facts, the time is right for a critical reexamination of The New American Poetry, utilizing information about the Cold War that has only recently come to light, as well as new ways of thinking about national and transnational literature which...
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Unbinding the Female Prometheus: L'Écriture féminine in Selected Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Piňosová, Michaela ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
The definition of one's femininity and its reflection in poetic language are two recurring issues examined by contemporary feminist critics. In their works, they consistently challenge the opinion that true poetry is essentially masculine, and that a woman poet is inevitably an inferior poet. Sylvia Plath, whose poetry represents the central subject of this thesis, could hardly be considered an inferior poet. Despite her early death, Plath's poetry continues to be immensely influential, and it tends to be adopted as an example by feminist critics who attempt to define the branch American women's poetry, reaching back to poets such as Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson. From their point of view, Plath's works illustrate the fact that women's poetry has not only its history, but also its language. One may thus discover interesting parallels between the French-based concept of l'écriture féminine and Plath's poetic language. For the representatives of the l'écriture féminine movement Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Western discourse is phallogocentric, i.e. based on the centrality of the phallus as a primary signifier. To disrupt the traditional (masculine) discourse, they neither propose a total split between the "male" and the "female" signifiers nor do they encourage women to...
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Chicana Literature: A Feminist Perspective of Gloria Anzaldua's Identity Politics
Jiroutová Kynčlová, Tereza ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee) ; Rohrleitner, Marion Christina (referee)
Chicana Literature: A Feminist Perspective of Gloria Anzaldúa's Identity Politics Doctoral Thesis Mgr. et Mgr. Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová 2017 ABSTRACT In the analyses executed in the present doctoral thesis, Chicana literary production emerges as a complex example of a strategic and reflexive instrumentalization of literature in the form of a political and activist tool contributing to Chicanas' gender and cultural emancipation on the one hand. On the other hand, within the Chicana/o context, literature is employed for perfecting the politics of recognition of the marginalized nation typified by the specificity of its geographic, cultural, and social location on the U.S.-Mexico border where a plethora of socially constructed categories interact and intersect. The doctoral thesis further provides a gender analysis of literary representations of Chicana/o lived experience by Chicana feminist writers in general and by Gloria Anzaldúa in particular, and investigates how these representations help shape feminist thought not only in relation to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, but within and beyond the United States. Moreover, the thesis supplies an interpretation of Anzaldúa's reconceptualization of the border concept as a pertinent means for comprehending Chicanas'/os' socio-cultural context and for forging a...
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Science Fiction as Social Fiction: British Sci-fi and its Antecedents
Boháčková, Kristýna ; Clark, Colin Steele (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
The goal of this thesis is to trace the roots of British science fiction literature and examine the evolution of the genre, noting the recurring themes, tropes and overall legacy of the canonical works of British sci-fi in contemporary literature. It also contains an analysis of the specifically British nature, pessimistic and featuring passive characters, especially in comparison to the natural counterpart that is American SF, which shows more optimistic tone, empowered human characters. Defining science fiction literature is complicated on its own, and it is therefore one of main issues tackled in this thesis. It is presented in the first chapter, focusing particularly on definitions proposed by Robert A. Heinlein, Darko Suvin, Brian Aldiss and Robert Scholes. These multiple, more or less conflicting definitions are argued to demonstrate the diversity of the subgenres of science fiction, thus exploring the genre's boundaries as they apply today. The second chapter considers works arguably identified as the first exemplary novels of the genre. The authors from pre-Victorian period mentioned include Lucian of Samosa, Jonathan Swift and Francis Godwin and their theological and satirical works are analysed in science fiction context. The second part of this chapter explores the shift that came with...
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Panoptical tropes and negotiations between art and politics in Charles Johnson's short fiction
Ženíšek, Jakub ; Procházka, Martin (advisor) ; Jařab, Josef (referee) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
Doctoral dissertation: Panoptical tropes and negotiations between art and politics in Charles Johnson's short fiction Abstract The dissertation traces the uneasy marriage between ideology and aesthetics in African American literature, and its reflections in Charles Johnson's short fiction. The historical introduction is an attempt to reevaluate the tradition of ideological self-policing in African American literature. Its central thesis resides in the claim that African American literature and its critical reception has still retained some of this ideological template, in a manner and degree that throws it out of sync with the mainstream trajectory of American literature. This lingering anachronism cannot be legitimately attributed to a single causative circumstance, yet one of the more obvious explanations for this residual trend is the living memory of overt discriminatory practices in many parts of the United States, which is why the centrifugal literary discourses of assimilationism and protest fiction are still very vibrant. This simple argument alone provides a sufficient basis for contextualizing and understanding the thesis that ideological writing still inadvertently manages to find its way into African American fictional pursuits. This is also underscored by the observable fact that even the...
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Nodal and Extranodal Lymphomas: Clinicopathological, Immunohistochemical, Molecular-Biological Charactersistics
Veselá, Pavla ; Boudová, Ludmila (advisor) ; Křížková, Věra (referee) ; Křen, Leoš (referee)
3 Abstract The doctor thesis is composed of two major studies, both of them focused on the mantle cell lymphoma (MCL). The first part deals with the verification of the prognostic influence of Mantle Cell Lymphoma International Prognostic Index (MIPI) and of the proliferative activity in 235 patients with MCL diagnosed in 1996-2008 in the Czech Republic. This population study was performed in the collaboration with the Czech Lymphoma Study Group. The clinical data of patients were completed in April 2012. The diagnosis of MCL was confirmed by our central histopathologic examination of pretherapeutic histological samples. The median overall survival (OS) was 47 months, median progression free survival (PFS) was 22 months. We demonstrated the influence of proliferative activity, MIPI and of the therapy type (intensive/non-intensive) on OS and PFS in univariate and multivariate analysis. Using univariate analysis we showed the prognostic influence of aggressive/other cytomorphological variants of MCL, nodal/extranodal localization of primary sample and also of the variants of MIPI - s-MIPI, MIPIb and a completely new variant of MIPI - combined MIPI. The prognostic influence of growth pattern and of the results of immunohistochemical reaction with CD23, CD5 and cyclin D1 antibodies were not confirmed. The other...
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Representations of the Female Voice in US Prose Fiction
Landerová, Petra ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
The present MA thesis explores the concept of a female body and voice and their transformations as presented by various American writers. The chosen male authored works include Washington Square by Henry James, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, and The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, for these writers delineate their heroines Catherine Sloper, Lady Brett Ashley, and Oedipa Maas in a turbulent period of their lives when they attempt to break with the obsolescent roles of passive and obedient daughters, partners, and wives. These fictional agents use different kinds of resistance, but as women, they are, nevertheless, mediated through the dominant male and masculine discourse that pervades the fictionalized societies in which these female agents appear. As for fictional work by female writers, without the assumption that the gender of the writer makes any literary work more or less "feminine", I have chosen The Awakening by Kate Chopin, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, a short-story "Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor, and Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker. The female heroines of the selected literary works bear a number of traumas women have had to endure under the patriarchal order and this thesis will address those traumas, their manifestation in the female psyche, and how...
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"After the Future Went Away"- The Dystopianism and Current Trends in Modern Speculative British Fiction
Šedivá, Barbora ; Clark, Colin Steele (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
The objective of the present study is to identify and analyse the common themes of dystopian fiction in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and to trace the transformation of these themes, as well as the development of new thematic realizations, in contemporary British speculative fiction. The analysis involves prominent recent authors including Iain Banks, Ken MacLeod, Adam Roberts, Charles Stross, and Chris Beckett; and through the selected works of these authors it aims to explore the recent trends in science fiction and its utopian subgenres. Besides these goals, the study aims to provide the reader with a thorough definition of dystopianism and a concise overview of the historical development of this genre and its manifestations in the works of the above-mentioned authors. As the most prominent and recurring themes in dystopian literature, both traditional and contemporary, the thesis recognizes concepts such as the manipulation through language and media, the loss of individual freedom and privacy, and the abuse of power by elites, all of which are of special importance for the present-day social thinking and politics. Structurally, the study is divided into three chapters, the first of them assuming the role of theoretical introduction, whereas the...
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"Am I Not a Man and a Brother?": Representations of Slavery in the West Indies and Abolitionist Rhetoric on the Road to Emancipation
Bartová, Nikola ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
This thesis is concerned with literature connected with the abolition of slavery in British colonies. The thesis will treat the topic of the abolitionist movement from the perspective of social, cultural and literary history from the beginnings until the abolition of slavery in British colonies in the Caribbean in 1833 with the Slavery Abolition Act. The thesis will focus on the discourse of race and slavery. The chosen authors represent different opinions and perspectives as the discussion will focus on sentimental poetry, travel writings as well as slave narratives. The chief aim is to identify and define the strategies of abolitionist discourse and the rhetorical practices which it employed especially in shaping the image of Africans and how the hegemonic discourse of sentimentalism influenced their writing. The first part of the thesis is concerned with establishing a theoretical background and the establishing of the literary traditions and customs of the eighteenth century, definition of the sentimental discourse and philosophies of the Enlightenment. This will be framed by a definition of Edward Said's "Orientalism" as well as Paul Gilroy's theory of the "Black Atlantic," which will enable us to define the space between Britain, Africa and the Caribbean, where the history of slavery of...
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Finding America: Issues of Acculturation and Assimilation in the Works of Anzia Yezierska
Jegerová, Dagmar ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
This BA thesis deals with the acculturation and assimilation of East European Jewish immigrant women in the pre-WWI United States, as represented in the selected works of Anzia Yezierska ("Wings," "Hunger," "The Free Vacation House," "The Fat of the Land," "How I Found America," and Bread Givers). The source of the conflict in the texts is the discrepancy between the immigrant ideals of America as the land of their dreams, and the Americanizers' demand for Anglo-conformity. Operating with definitions of assimilation by Robert Park and Arnold Rose, and Milton Gordon's concept of intrinsic and extrinsic cultural traits, this interdisciplinary analysis approaches the conflict on two levels. Firstly, as the clash of the Jewish and American traits, identified in the representatives of each culture. Secondly, as the confrontation of the first and second generation immigrants, whose differing visions of America influenced their attitude towards acculturation and assimilation, determining its efficiency. The thesis debates whether formalized Americanization, as represented in the primary texts, enables complete assimilation on both the intrinsic and extrinsic levels. Since the texts frequently place the Jewish and American traits in polar opposition, the thesis explores whether assimilation, as the...
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