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Signifying in the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt
Koy, Christoper Erwin ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee) ; Jařab, Josef (referee)
(English): The dissertation is fundamentally a study of intertextuality. Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) was an African American novelist, essayist and short story writer whose voracious reading habits of classical Western literature as well as the writing of his contemporaries had a substantial impact on his writing, an impact which is investigated for the first time applying the theory of African American rhetoric of Henry Louis Gates. The study applies the notion of "signifying" (as Gates describes it in The Signifying Monkey) to Chesnutt and his use of fiction by Ovid, Apulieus, Walter Scott, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Washington Cable and Albion Tourgée. The research explores how Chesnutt quotes from, revises and parodies, (among other mimetic strategies), the language, plots and characters of the aforementioned writers. Abstrakt (česky): Tato disertační práce se zabývá studiem intertextuality v díle afroamerického autora románů, esejí a povídek Charlese W. Chesnutta (1858-1932), který byl ve své tvorbě významně ovlivněn vlastní horlivou četbou klasické západní literatury i literární tvorbou svých současníků. Tato disertace je prvním pokusem o prozkoumání těchto vlivů, a to s využitím teorie afroamerické rétoriky, jejímž autorem je Henry Louis Gates. Práce aplikuje pojem "signifikace"...
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A dream deferred: continuities in African American autobiographies
Bosničová, Nina ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Procházka, Martin (referee) ; Jařab, Josef (referee)
As a great number of recent scholarly publications discussing the given topic shows, the genre of autobiography provides a fruitful field for literary research and analysis. In part, this springs from the genre's rather ambiguous nature and blurred boundaries. A lot of autobiographies are claimed to interweave elements of fact and fiction and to stand on the verge between literary works and cultural, or historiographical, documents. Since autobiographies are, for the most part, understood as accounts of real life and authentic experience, rather than imagination, they are thought to be particularly efficient in persuading the reader to believe the author/narrator, accept the author's/narrator's point of view and his/her perception of the world. This gives them, in addition to other things, a strong potential to serve as tools in the political struggles of various kinds. This statement is especially true of the African American autobiography. Black autobiography, from its very first specimen, namely the slave narrative, has played a central role in the literary tradition of African Americans. It has played a crucial part in their attempt to survive and fight racism, sexism and "classism" frequently oriented against them in the American society. Being conscious of the social impact of the printed word, many...
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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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The power of self-delusion in Eugene O'Neill's Long day's journey into night and Arthur Miller's Death of a salesman
Klupková, Petra ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee) ; Wallace, Clare (advisor)
Arthur Miller and Eugene Gladstone O'Neill both established themselves as major theatrical icons in America, also earning an international prestige as influential playwrights. While O'Neill is one of the most prominent playwrights America has seen at the turn of the 19th century, Miller markedly stands out from the generation that immediately followed. Their dramatic achievements were recognized both by the audience and the critics, resulting in the highest critical acclaim both in the form of various prestigious awards, O'Neill becoming the first American dramatist to receive the Nobel Prize, as well as causing remarkable controversy. The two plays that are to be examined, Miller's Death of a Salesman and O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, have both been praised as the authors' finest pieces of writing, and both received the Pulitzer Prize, O'Neill's fourth one, only this time awarded posthumously. Miller himself expressed his admiration to O'Neill's work, as he marked him his "favorite playwright" in an 1957 interview, referring to Long Day's Journey as to a "masterpiece." Even though it might seem that Miller's work draws richly upon the legacy of O'Neill, he refuses any influence of his upon his own writing.1 A similar respect can be seen with T.S. Eliot, who paid tribute to O'Neill by claiming...
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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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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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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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Family ideal and real: the change of the image of the family in selected works of Mexican American authors
Sládková, Magdalena ; Kolinská, Klára (referee) ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor)
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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Responding to the Holocaust: the survivor's complex in reality and fiction
Míčková, Klára ; Frankl, Michal (referee) ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor)
The survivor's complex is indeed a complicated matter which in itself might be discussed in greater detail than suggested here. Defining it mainly on psychological and psychiatric grounds is best suitable for the attempted literary analysis of the characters' inner souls and mental burdens. However, it could also be approached from social or cultural views which for the sake of the main theme of my thesis, which is to apply conclusions regarding authentic survivors and their real post-Holocaust lives to the characters created by the imaginative minds of fiction writers, I omit. Likewise, Cynthia Ozick's Rosa and Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet can be treated purely as works of literary imagination without taking the survivor's complex into account and discussed in terms of their narrations or themes only. Nevertheless, without studying the survivor's complex, an important part of the works', or better characters' analyses would be neglected. I am not suggesting that all fiction about the Holocaust incorporates and displays the survivor's complex, but the complex still remains a part of most (both authentic and fictional) survivors' post-Holocaust lives and should therefore be given enough space in the analyses of works which deal with the theme of the Holocaust. The aim of the first part of this work was...
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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 ; Nováková, Soňa (referee) ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor)
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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