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Power through humour: Thomas King's strategies for decolonizing Canada
Tuček, Jaroslav ; Jindra, Miroslav (referee) ; Kolinská, Klára (advisor)
This dissertation is about power, humour and various comic and ironic strategies contemporary Native writers and artists apply in their works to challenge the outdated Indian stereotypes and obsolete systems of cultural and aesthetic representation. The artists employ a combination of comedy and irony as favoured modes of expression in order to contest, subvert and critically deconstruct the oppressive hegemonic ideologies and power structures still present in Canada and the United States. Their novels, poetry, essays, films, documentaries, theatre performances, paintings and other works of art strive to emphasize the marginalization and rights of all Native people in North America who have suffered over the hundreds of years of colonization, acculturation and violent cultural appropriation. In the last decade, there have been growing calls from academia, Native communities as well as the government, to reconceptualise the bi-cultural politics between the First Nation peoples and the Canadian nation-state. A great amount of models for an inclusionary and multifaceted identity politics have been proposed by several Canadian cultural analysts and critics, including for example Diana Brydon, Smaro Kamboureli, and Lily Cho. However, before they can be successfully implemented, a creation of an alternative space...
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Homegrown stereotyping: the shaping of Canadian consciousness through television broadcasting
Prosečová, Lenka ; Kolinská, Klára (advisor) ; Jindra, Miroslav (referee)
To define Canada and the Canadian nation is no easy task. From a historical perspective, Canada is a very young country: until 1949 there was no Canadian citizenship, the Canadian flag appeared as late as 1965, and it wasn't until 1967 that the Canadian national anthem could be heard. Although Canada would thereafter finally seem to have been able to establish its distinct identity in opposition to its mother country, Canadian patriotism has continued to be problematic. Despite years of efforts to form a pan-Canadian identity - characterized especially by Pierre Trudeau's attempts to institute federal bilingualism and a pan-Canadian identity rooted in liberal individualism - the existence of a self-conscious Canadian nation remains questionable. Within the Canadian Anglophone population there seems to be no unified notion of a panCanadian nation and thus no innate nationalism. Furthermore, for the rest of the world, Canada remains a mystery, an "Unknown Country."] Arthur Lismer, a member of the Group of Seven, assessed the situation as follows: "after 1919 most creative people, whether in painting, writing or music, began to have a guilty feeling that Canada was as yet unwritten, unpainted, unsung [ ... ],,2 Indeed, efforts were made to "capture" Canada in paintings, photography, in poetry and prose, in...
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Post-colonial adaptations of Shakespeare's plays
Hlaváčková, Anna ; Kolinská, Klára (referee) ; Pšenička, Martin (advisor)
This thesis deals with the analyses of three adaptations of Shakespeare's plays in postcolonial countries like Canada, Trinidad and Tobago and Republic of South Africa. Three plays are examined in historical and cultural context of colonial and post-colonial theatre of the countries mentioned above. The first chapter of the thesis familiarizes the reader with problems of colonialism and its cultural effects. The aim of the thesis is to point out to the way, in which the authors of the adaptations treat the works of William Shakespeare, the leading playwright of mother imperium - Great Britain, and simultaneously emphasize unusual position of the adaptations in the framework of their cultural surrounding and in the framework of post-colonial drama.
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The Arab peoples of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the light of post-colonial theory
Nitsche, David ; Kolinská, Klára (referee) ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor)
It can be said that The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a work whose true potential has not yet been discovered. That the work presents itself to be of greater value than may have previously seemed goes without question. However, during the more than eighty years of its existence, it was the author and not the work that created major interest in the academic world. The complicated character of T.E. Lawrence offered itself to psycho-analyst interpretation and most critiques have been built on these premises. Other works have concentrated on major historical events in Lawrence's life creating thorough biographies and numbers of fascinating approaches, some more, some less misleading were created. However. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (from henceforth "Seven Pillars") foremostly survived in the shadows of David Lean's film "Lawrence of Arabia" and it was only during the late seventies, that concentration on the Seven Pillars as a text had begun to be cultivated. Additionally, it has only been during the past few years that works by writers such as Gertrude Bell, T.E. Lawrence or Charles M. Doughty have begun to gain a larger public interest. The aim of this work, however, is not to analyse the historical purpose of Lawrence's presence in the Middle East, nor to align the Seven Pillars with historical facts. Such...
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Female heroines in the English gothic novel
Challyjeva, Aknur ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
In a brilliant parody of the Gothic novel Jane Austen jokes about the differences between men and women, claiming that the former read history and the latter only novels. The novel mentioned above is Northanger Abbey, and the young heroine affected by reading novels is Catherine Morland. Albeit she enjoys reading novels and in particular Gothic novels, she is still somewhat ashamed of her taste in literature. However, her embarrassment decreases when she hears that the object of her adoration is also greatly fond of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's writing: "I am very glad to hear it, indeed: and now I shall never be ashamed of liking Udolpho myself. But I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly."1 Austen's tone is only gently mocking her heroine's taste in literature, on the contrary she acknowledges the genius of Ann Radcliffe and other great novelists of the time. Indeed, if her sarcasm is targeted against anyone, it would be against the literary critics and the general population who discarded the Gothic novel as a trifling genre read by women. It is striking since Gothic novels are not exactly what could be called a proper reading for young women. The novels portray all types of violence and cruelty, they tell stories of incest, unbelievable brutality, and horrors. In the case of Ann Radcliffe...
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Voices of Native American women: the life narratives of Sarah Winnemucca, Zitkala-Sa, Maria Campbell and Leslie Marmon Silko
Nováková, Tereza ; Procházka, Martin (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to explore the genre of Native American women autobiography by concentrating on its four significant representatives. In the opening part, the work presents the genre providing its several definitions and tracing its origins. Further, it briefly summarizes the history of autobiography with a special focus on American literature and it introduces the genre of Native American autobiography and explains its particularities. Because the work deals with Native American women, the beginning also discusses their past and present social position and their first literary VOICeS. The central part of the thesis investigates four distinct autobiographical narratives written by Native American women at different times and it surveys the main themes that dominate the genre ofNative American woman autobiography. Although all discussed books are labeled as the autobiographies, they m1x together a number of various areas and genres such as history, sociology, mythology, ethnography, political documents, and many others. Native American oral storytelling forms the fundamental base in the analyzed texts, but it is the most experimental autobiography of Leslie Marmon Silko that is wholly constructed as the process of storytelling when her stories carry formal characteristics of Indian oral tales such...
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A voice of one's own: the construction of identity and gender in Margaret Laurence's "Manawaka cycle" texts
Gybasová, Kristina ; Jindra, Miroslav (referee) ; Kolinská, Klára (advisor)
Margaret Laurence (1926-87) has been called "Canada's most successful novelist,"l "the most significant creative writer in Canadian literature,"2 as well as "the most renowned writer in Canadian literary history."3 A bearer of the distinguished Molson Prize, and of the Governor General Award twice,4 a Nobel Prize in Literature nominee in 1982,5 a receiver of a number of honorary doctorates from prestigious Canadian universities, and a Companion of the Order of Canada,6 she played a key role in establishing the canon of the newly emergent Canadian literature and placing it on the global literary map. As Kristjana Gunnars argues, Laurence "has been a founding mother of Canadian literature. She has given voice to the Manitoba prairie. She has raised the value of all sectors of society by showing the full humanity of the most neglected and forgotten among us. From her example, we have learned the value of Canadian literature and culture; the importance of art to that culture; the necessity of honesty in a dangerous time in history; the truth of fiction and poetry."?
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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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Japanese American experience in the works of Nisei authors
Dušáková, Hana ; Kolinská, Klára (referee) ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor)
Presenting this diploma thesis as a general overview of one group of writers, perhaps only a few words would suffice for the explication of my choice. Putting aside any emotional or personal involvement of mine in this topic, which stems from my ongoing interest in Japanese culture and the study of this language, I regard Japanese Americans and the literature they produced as unique in several respects. Considering their often contradictory reception and the turbulent historical shifts they were subjected to, one has to view this group as a generation of paradoxes. Being born in America, yet all their lives contending with the label of "exotic" or "oriental," struggling to conform, but only to discover that this effort (if it brought them closer to their peers) distanced them from their immigrant parents, writing literature in a language that was usually not their original mother tongue. These are attributes and dilemmas that would pertain probably to any recent group of immigrants to the United States. But what singles out the Japanese American experience among the countless other immigrant histories, is their collective experience in the years 1942-1944, when the nation they long aspired to be a part of suddenly crushed these hopes in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack by considering them an enemy and...
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Listening to our mothers' minds: intercultural and intergenerational conflict in Amy Tan's writing
Lamb, Alice ; Kolinská, Klára (referee) ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor)
The notion of Chinese character being a hereditary entity that cannot be changed by any outer circumstances is a complex belief characteristic of any Chinese community both living in mainland China and in any foreign country. It is a primary factor that subconsciously prevents first generation Chinese immigrants from teaching their children Chinese language as their mother tongue and from imposing on them Chinese family traditions and rules that would apply in their home country. It is the character and its distinctive features that cause their deliberate enclosure in "ghettoes" of China Towns, forming Chinese Diasporas that prevent the immigrant parents from assimilating with their new societies. As a consequence, the second generation immigrants become double marginalised and the immigrant communities are troubled by two major contradicting forces: all Chinese immigrant parents face the problem of reconciliation with the cultural assimilation of their children and all children feel the generation gap between themselves and their conservative parents. In every Chinese community today there are thus two elements in continuous tension: the openness towards the outside world, the desire to borrow the good things and, by integrating them with ancient Chinese tradition, to enrich themselves as a result of this...
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