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The rise of African American radicalism and the fall of the African American-Jewish coalition in the United States
Urban, Daniel ; Calda, Miloš (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
This work aims at examining the origins of the civil rights coaiition between African Americans and American Jews, its achievements and its fall following the rise of radicalism among African Americans and other historical developments in the late 1960s. It is clear that the abolition of slavery alone did not bring about social, economic and political integration of African Americans. Black codes and unwritten discriminatory customs prevented them from securing their rightful and equal place among white Americans. In order to fight racism and discrimination and support integration more effectively, African Americans started to organize in a number of organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). However, because they lacked leadership, funding as well as organizational skills, they needed an ally and American Jews proved to be a dexterous one. There were a number of things that African Americans and Jews shared at that time: no ne of the two ethnic groups had a homeland in the sense that for example Italian Americans did before World War II. African Americans recognized and understood the fact that Jews had been living in poor conditions and under a constant threat to their lives in Europe. Furthermore,...
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"The victim of one's victim" The process of victimization in William Faulkner's The sound and the fury
Novotná, Ema ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Nováková, Soňa (referee)
William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury was written eighty years ago but is still considered a unique and a remarkable novel. It was published in the "annus mirabilis" (Andrews 251), i.e. the miraculous year of 1929, which introduced literary works of authors who changed the world of literature substantially. Ernest Miller Hemingway's war novel A Farewell to Arms influenced other representatives of one literary generation, i.e. the Lost Generation just as Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Faulkner's essential novel participated in the genesis of a literary movement: Modernism, or American Modernism, respectively. The difficult structure of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury did not wait for first interpretations - it was discussed and analyzed the moment it reached the hands of critics, university professors and students. Scholars examined the peculiar specifics of Faulkner's style of writing as well as the tangled web of his meticulously constructed characters and his precisely arranged passages and chapters. Various aspects: his use of madness and sanity, his unique concept of time organized according to psychological rather than linear time, a stream of consciousness narrative, warped heroes, "disruptive female characters" (Roberts, XI) - all seen from the perspective of Faulkner's fictitious...
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Family ideal and real: the change of the image of the family in selected works of Mexican American authors
Sládková, Magdalena ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
The fact that in the twenty-first century Latinos became the largest ethnic minority in the United States is inevitably mentioned in any recent publication on Latino population in the U.S. l People of Mexican origin form the largest percentage of the Latino group, 58%, according to the 2000 U.S. census.2 Mexican Americans have a long history of settling in the United States, nevertheless, their disadvantaged position in the American society is evident. They are usually located among the working-class, have low income, and also low educational attainment. Some social scientists, whose works will be mentioned in this thesis, believe that it is the Mexican American culture that prevents this population from success; others attribute it to discrimination and negative stereotypes of Mexicans that are perpetuated in the American society. In the 1960s and 1970s the Mexican American civil rights movement, known as the Chicano Movement, decided to end the discrimination and other social problems by supporting Mexican American nationalism. One of the ways to increase their national pride was to point at the Mexican American family as a source of strength and a symbol of unity of all Mexicans in the United States. The Chicano Movement asked artists to create works of art that would represent the Chicano family as an...
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Komparační studie čtyř romských životních příběhů
Ryvolová, Karolína ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Acton, Thomas (referee) ; Soukup, Daniel (referee)
The objective of this thesis is to do a comparative analysis of four Romany life-stories in prose from different parts of the world and identify features which may justly be called characteristic of Romany writing. The comparison of Victor Vishnevsky's Memories of a Gypsy, Mikey Walsh's Gypsy Boy and Gypsy Boy on the Run, Andrej Giňa's Paťiv. Ještě víme, co je úcta and Irena Eliášová's Naše osada yields valuable insights into how Romany writers construct their identity and to what extent their current work relates to the existing literary genres. Because of Romany studies' multidisciplinary nature, the extensive introduction lays the theoretical foundations for the analysis. I proceed from the characteristics of Romany studies in general in part 1.2 to the way it was practised during my undergraduate years in Prague as opposed to the Western tradition (part 1.3). Using a case study of the schism Romany studies are currently facing in the Czech Republic, in part 1.4 I attempt to illustrate the more general epistemological challenges the field has been grappling with between essentialist/primordialist and radical constructivist views. As there is a definite scarcity of theoretical literature conceptualising Romany writing, in part 1.5 of the introduction the existing body of work is assessed and found...
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African-American Women Leaders after 1950s
Rybková, Veronika ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
Thesis abstract The thesis attempts truthfully to illustrate a situation of black female leaders active in the United States of the second half of the twentieth century. In order to cover this period, four black women activists will be focused on as representatives of two different generations. On the one hand, Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer will stand for the older generation because their activist careers culminated in the 1960s. On the other hand, Angela Davis and bell hooks will represent the subsequent decades as it was at that time when their careers matured. A comparison of the two generations will reveal considerable similarities in the four women's perspective on the nature of the struggle against white supremacy. It is necessary to bear in mind that this perspective was to a great extent influenced by a special kind of oppression the women faced as members of a marginalized group, that is, of the black community. Firstly, a detailed examination of the women's childhood and youth will show that it was already at that time when the four black women realized the presence of racism in their lives. Moreover, the focus on their background also introduces similar motives of the four women's decision to become active participants in the black community's struggle. Secondly, after the description of the...
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William Faulkner's Light in August: constructing race in the community
Jelínková, Karolína ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
When William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, he entered the times of the high tide of racial extremism that marked the post-Reconstruction era and the beginning of the 20th century. The small domestic world of the Falkner family William lived in as a small boy also afforded him contact with racial differences, most memorably through the servant of the Falkner family - Caroline Barr. This was a harmonious contact. The Falkner boys called Caroline "Mammy" Callie; "she cooked, she cleaned, and she cared for them but most of all the boys liked her stories - of animals in the woods, ghosts, and the 'Old Days' of slavery. The boys loved her dearly" (Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History 153). However, William was soon confronted with the other side of the racially divided world. This must have happened most powerfully in the year 1908, when Oxford, Mississippi witnessed the lynching of Nelse Patton, "a black convict, but also [ ... ] a 'trusty'" (Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History 157) who was allowed to run errands all over the town. He killed Mattie McMillan, a white woman, to whom he delivered a message, but refused to leave her house. She attempted to draw a pistol, but he stopped her and "drew a razor blade across [her] throat [ ... ], almost severing her head from her...
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(Re)Shaping the "White trash" myth: Dorothy Allison's defiant attempt to deconstruct the "White trash" myth from within
Josková, Zuzana ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Heczková, Libuše (referee)
ill contemporary cultural, social, and literary studies in the USA "whiteness" has recently become the central issue of scholarly interest (Wray 146). The goal of "whiteness studies" is to challenge white invisibility and its normative character which continues to permeate most aspects of American life. Rendering the quality of "whiteness" as yet another object of identity debate destroys the racial hierarchy and opens this concept to an honest and unbiased analysis. However, as Matt Wray points out: "Scholars of whiteness have become extraordinarily sure-footed and nimble when the word that follows white is supremacy, power, privilege, or pride, but they tend to stumble badly when it is followed by trash" (Wray 3). This insinuates that whiteness studies are following a common pattern in the American social and cultural discourse and disregard the complexity of the given question, focusing solely on the problematic of "race", and ignoring the numerous related issues such as that of class, gender, sexuality, etc 1. This articulates the need for new approaches to the studies of identity; not those which focus on its single aspect, but those which take into account its complex, fluid and constantly evolving nature. "White trash" as a cultural concept unites numerous identity categories, and it is therefore...
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Emerging Voices: The Portrayal of Minorities in the Work of Willa Cather
Plicková, Michaela ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
The thesis seeks to explore the portrayal of the othered, marginalized individuals in the fictional work of Willa Cather. The primary focus of the text is the first-person narrative of My Ántonia (1917). Other complementary primary sources are Cather's remaining two prairie novels - O Pioneers! (1913) and The Song of the Lark (1915) - and two books of the author's later artistic creation - Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). The former two books function as a preliminary mapping of Cather's concerns developed in My Ántonia, the latter two texts present Cather's later reflections of otherness. The thesis focuses on Cather's incessant examination of the workings of the white, male, heteronormative discourse in the context of modern American nationhood: by her "queer" writing, she aims to unearth and subvert the coercive social mechanisms, and give voice to those who were eclipsed from the project of the rising economic empire: ethnic others (African Americans, Native Americans, European immigrants), and gendered and sexual others (women, homosexuals and lesbians). The identity of modern American society reposes on the construction of the social other and the artificial category of normality. Cather, on the other hand, examines the difference - sexual, racial,...
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An Outlaw Journalist's Journey through an Era Decadent and Depraved: Hunter S. Thompson in the context of America of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Stárek, Jiří ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
The thesis aims to explore the artistic personality of Hunter S. Thompson, one of the most distinctive cultural figures of post-war America, and his genesis as an author, journalist, and a counterculture idol of the 1960s. The era is now widely regarded as a turning point in contemporary American history as its deep-rooted values and norms were, over the course of a decade, gradually transformed by the young generation of social and political activists toward allegedly a more tolerant and liberal kind of community. Crucial in such an endeavor was the role of the countercultural movement that produced some of the most capable intellectual minds of the time, including Thompson. The paper thus analyzes the role and nature of the alternative culture in America as perceived by one of its most observant participants. Also, the thesis focuses on the author's role in establishing a new genre called New Journalism which can be linked with the era's countercultural efforts as well. In general, Thompson, in his texts, examines various phenomena surrounding the counterculture and provides us with a distinctive portrayal of the era's zeitgeist. However, unlike some of his contemporaries, he also remembers to examine numerous flaws and fallacies existing within contemporary American society, the American Dream...
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Fictional paths to a larger truth in american new journalism
Chamonikolas, Kryštof ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
Truman Garcia Capote (1924 - 1984) and Norman Kingsley Mailer (born 1923) were renown in the 1960s as both novelists and journalists. In two of their best-known and often most valued works, In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1965) and The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel- The Novel as History (1968), they attempted to combine their novelistic and journalistic skills to a yet unprecedented degree and create what Capote himself termed a "nonfiction novel". They wrote book-long texts which 'read like novels', but were simultaneously well-researched and highly accurate journalistic reportages on real events. Originally started as magazine assignments, they both established themselves as landmarks of the 1960s American novel and as central works of the American new journalism, a literary and journalistic movement and genre attempting to blend literary writing techniques with journalistic factuality and accuracy. Despite their common aim and status as "nonfiction novels", however, In Cold Blood and The Armies of the Night represent radically different, even antithetic types of both novel and reportage. A more detailed analysis and critical assessment of their differences and their relationship to other similar works, which I will attempt in this MA thesis, should...
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