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Reflections of the deleuzian "time-image" in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and of Alain Resnais
Konoreva, Evguenia ; Armand, Louis (referee) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor)
During the twentieth century, cinematography matured into an independent and potent form of art. Film as a sequence of images caught in continuity presents a unique tool of capturing time; it allows the viewer to observe the manipulation of temporal and of spatial values, which before was not possible in the arts. Furthermore, the technical and aesthetic conceptualization of cinematography was evolutionarily developing during its short history and, according to Deleuze, saw a major break after Citizen Kane (1941)and most forcefully following the Second World War. This break resulted in the emergence of the so-called 'time-image', which in its essence reveals a radical alienation of the individual in contemporary society, but seeks to establish a new philosophy of space and time in a disorientated post-war world. The present analyses of the films chosen in this project aimed at revealing the new realities created by our two chosen film-makers. These realities echo the complexity and ambiguity of the contemporary individuality; these are the realities of a post-war subjectivity, one that is at one stroke both questioned and fragmented. Both Alain Resnais and Andrei Tarkovsky, whose bodies of work were conditioned by the emergence of a new post-modern consciousness, created a new cinematic style and also...
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The Emersonian Pynchon
Naser, Safwan ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
Ralph Waldo Emerson and his postmodemist colleague Thomas Pynchon ... a seemingly incongruous connection. The aim of this thesis is to explore the unusual relationship between these prominent authors and advert to the great influence which Ralph Waldo Emerson unquestionably had not only on authors who were not separated from him by such a noticeable temporal abysm, but also a most recent author who, according to the vast majority of the definitions of the postmodern, should be entirely free of any Emersonian influence. This intricate relationship will be assessed mainly through Mason and Dixon, the most recent novel by Thomas Pynchon which reflects many aspects of what Emerson found absolutely central. The summation of what seems to be propounded throughout the entire novel is represented by the idea of determining boundaries, in both the literal and the abstract sense. Emerson himself devoted much attention to this subject matter and it is clear that Pynchon and Emerson have much in common from this perspective, which holds true to such an extent that the boundary between the postmodem and romantic is itself facing the pressure of redefinition, which is in turn a fundamental concept which both authors share.
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Edward W. Said: postcolonial studies and the politics of literary theory
Machátová, Bibiana ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
I first heard the name of Edward W. Said in a university seminar two years ago. His name was mentioned by one of my American teachers and not many of us knew who Edward Said was. After trying to find out who he was I was amazed that I had never heard about one of the most widely known and controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. I was very surprised that this influential author within the fields of literary theory, post-colonial and cultural studies is so little known within the Czech academic sphere. One of the most striking facts is that as of September 2007, there were only five entries by Said in the Czech National Library!. Similarly, only three of his brief essays were translated into Czech? Thus the purpose of this thesis is to grant appropriate attention to Edward W. Said and present an interpretive overview of his work which is necessary before one can begin to place Said in proper perspectives as the individual whom many have claimed as a centrally important twentieth century figure. It will explore Said's contribution to many disciplines ranging from literary theory and criticism to cultural history to postcolonial studies, as well as the literary, cultural, social, and aesthetic roles he has played as an academic intellectual. It will also attempt to interpret the key moments in...
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The metaphysical detective story in Paul Auster's The New York trilogy and Thomas Pynchon's The crying of lot 49
Buršíková, Marika ; Robbins, David Lee (referee) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor)
While the first two chapters of the thesis provide the necessary theoretical framework concerning the classical detective story and the metaphysical detective story, in the third chapter this framework is employed to analyze the particular themes that are present in The New York Trilogy and The Crying of Lot 49. To explain the metaphysical detective story, a step back to the classical detective story as its predecessor is required. To sum up the oppositions expressed in criticism dealing with this subject, the contrast between these two genres has been defined in terms of high art and popular art (Todorov), art and kitsch (Holquist), ontological dominant and epistemological dominant (McHale), postmodern and positivistic mode of thinking (Spanos). The metaphysical detective story takes the conventions of the classical detective story and distorts them in order to betray the reader's expectations. Since the popular genres are constituted by their corresponding sets of conventions which need to be familiar, any change in them causes the work to lose its status as part of the genre. In this case, the classical detective story has served as a point of departure for many authors who transformed it into a completely different genre which had no longer anything to do with popular literature. Classical detective...
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The disappointment of the Western intellectual in the twentieth century (in Saul Bellow's novels Mr. Sammler's Planet and Herzog)
Slováčková, Hana ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee) ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor)
Saul Bellow's main characters are frequently persons who convey their experience with reality in the contemporary Western society. The concrete phenomena - their individual experiences fold up into a more conclusive reflection and lead to the comprehension of reality on a general level. And it is disappointment that best characterizes the resulting knowledge. The novels I selected for the thorough analysis, Mr.Sammler's Planet and Herzog, both depict and encounter of man with reality. The reflection of this encounter is presented by scholarly men, Mr. Sammler and Moses E. Herzog. Despite the fact that they are fictitious characters, their knowledge of Western thinkers makes them 'real' intellectual critics of the contemporary time. They connect through their theoretical scholarship and their personal lives, observations and experiences. The outcome is an account of the state of the contemporary Western society in the light of a broader understanding of its development. The course of that development or transformation can be analyzed with the help of works of influential Western thinkers for their reasoning always arises from the conditions of their present time. Their works containing novel concepts have impact on the future development but also inevitably reflect the past development. This is the reason...
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Giving a voice to the Other: Said's theory of anti-colonial resistance
Daghman, Ali ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee) ; Armand, Louis (advisor)
Compared to the detailed theoretical analysis of colonial power and discourse, the conception of anti-colonial resistance has been generally underdeveloped and undertheorised. This inadequate, theoretical concern with resistance to colonialism has lead to the current conception of colonial power and discourse in postcolonial theory. This argument is illustrated on the analysis of the approaches to resistance in the works of Foucault and Bhabha, who have paid the major attention to the issues of power, knowledge and colonialism. They are countered by the work of Edward Said who brings resistance to the focal point of the post- and anti-colonial discourse. Foucault argues that resistance is neither defined by terms of its object, nor is it the result of intentionality on the part of the subject, whether this subject is collective or individual. He thinks of power as an intentional question without a subject, as if he were talking about purposefulness without purpose or action without agency. Yet, Foucault's theory of resistance remains inadequately explored. For Foucault, resistance is not integral but rather a necessary condition for the operation of power. Power itself is viewed as an undifferentiated conception: he tends to think of power from the standpoint of its actual realisation, not the opposition to...
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Robert Frost: the village and beyond
Mecner, Michal ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee) ; Quinn, Justin (advisor)
Robert Frost (1874 - 1963) was a prominent American poet, teacher, lecturer, scholar, public figure, American symbol and thinker of the 20th century. As Archibald MacLeish emphasizes, Frost was not only a poet of his time, of the American nation, but - much like William Shakespeare - a poet of the English language itself (MacLeish, 439). Frost's command of colloquial speech and the New England dialect is considered by the critics to be outstanding. Depiction of rural life is dominant in Frost's poetry and Frost himself took the life of a farmer-poet. And, as MacLeish reminds us, Frost was city-born, town-bred and his story is rather one of a stranger who falls in love with New England and makes his life in it (MacLeish, 442). However, there is a gap between the traditional pastoral poetry and Frost's oeuvre which is modernistic in many ways. Nature clearly dominates Frost's verse but it is arguably not its central theme. Rather, it serves as a shifting background for the portrait of man, for the experience of what it means to be human. The merit of Frost's poetry lies in the dramatized relationship between the character portrayed and the environment surrounding him. Rather than depicting the dominance of one over the other (e.g. of man and technology over nature or the submission of man before nature),...
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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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The Puzzle Novel
Stock, Richard Thomas ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Peprník, Michal (referee) ; Miller, J. Hillis (referee)
This dissertation is based on the claim that the study of the novel has not capitalized on the designation of the novel's unique properties by thinkers early in the twentieth century. My specific determination of the puzzle novel is in a sense merely one example of the kind of study that I see as necessary to further our understanding of both the novel and narrative. I see the effort of narratology in the twentieth century as a necessary project, but ultimately a failure at its own goals. Theory of the novel, meanwhile, seemed better poised to produce useful criticism in the 1930s, but since then has not had the influence on scholarship that it should have had. To deal with this lack, various philosophical works are discussed and used in the dissertation, especially those from Gilles Deleuze and Maurice Blanchot. Three novels are studied in detail as puzzle novels, and although the novels are chosen purposefully, they do not constitute a complete set: Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce, which I call the first puzzle novel in the terms of this study; Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), the premier postmodern novel, and also an extreme puzzle novel; and Prisoner's Dilemma (1988) by Richard Powers, a puzzle novel that shows the true possibilities of the novel form. This study does not seek to make absolute...
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Authentic existence and the "American dream" in Dreiser's fiction
Černá, Pavlína ; Procházka, Martin (referee) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor)
If we ask ourselves what makes a nation, the most common answer would probably be the national attributes such as the same language, race, shared territory or history platform. But then how is it in the case of the United States of America? Its language, English, is originally a language from the British Isles, its population consists of many people of different races and cultural backgrounds. It would be quite problematic even to speak about some common past or a specific territory.1 So, what is it then that makes the United States of America? Harvard's Sacvan Bercovitch argues that this "nation is defined by the mythic word America"2 and for him "America is a myth."2 Taking the definition of myths, in the original meaning of the word they are "stories, usually concerning superhumans or gods, which are related to accompany or to explain religious beliefs: they originate far back in the culture of oral societies. A mythology is a system of mythical stories which, taken together, elaborate the religious or metaphysical beliefs of the society."3 Myths are important in functioning as building blocks of the nation, more precisely they "shape the way we see the world, how we think of ourselves, where we look for origins and purpose, including national origins and purpose." Finally, "every great culture has had a...
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