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Czech Immigrants in Minnesota; History and Critical Bibliography
Škopek, Jakub ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
This thesis takes a look at the reasons for the emigration of Czechs from Bohemia to the United States and how this emigration began in earnest after the European revolutionary year of 1848. It also takes a look at the related steps and procedures emigrants took to make this journey possible. A primary focus of this report will be the Czech immigrants that settled in Minnesota; however, the initial part of this work applies generally to Czech immigration to America. The first part of the thesis examines some of the political and social circumstances in Bohemia (as well as in much of Europe generally) that were responsible for the waves of immigration that took place in the second half of the 19th century. The thesis takes a look at how the people learned about America and about the possibilities of traveling there. The thesis also examines how the journey was made from Bohemia to one of the German ports of embarkation, as well as the difficulties and risks awaiting emigrants in such cities. Finally, this section explains the tremendous impact the new changes in sea travel - from sail to steam - had on the rapid rise in the numbers of immigrants coming into the United States. In the following section, the thesis considers some of the general difficulties faced by all new immigrants once they had...
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Emerson's influence on women in works of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Teršová, Tereza ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
Due to its emphasis on the concepts of self-reliance, inner guidance and the aboriginal Self, Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy elaborates theses that favor the individual over community, such as the superiority and sanctity of self-definition, as opposed to definitions constructed by society and imposed on the individual. It is possible, then, to perceive his philosophy as important for the formation of the Women's Rights Movement and for the emerging feminism. In his four romances, Nathaniel Hawthorne creates female protagonists who advocate for women's right to self-reliance as Emerson describes it. Hawthorne's heroines can be understood and interpreted as contemplating the Emersonian principles, thus illustrating the connection between Emerson's philosophy, and themes and motifs present in Hawthorne's romances. Related to Hawthorne's portrayal of the heroines' reflections on the concepts of inner guidance, the aboriginal Self, moral dereliction and self-reliance is Hawthorne's attitude toward the relationship between "womanhood" and "femininity" on one side, and "manhood" and "masculinity" on the other side. The ambivalence of woman, as depicted by Hawthorne, consists in the discrepancy between attributes traditionally associated with "femininity", such as devotion, affection and humility, and the will...
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Community in Toni Morrison's Fiction
Brzobohatá, Michaela ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Robbins, David Lee (referee)
English Abstract Toni Morrison deals with the topic of community to a greater or lesser extent in all of her books. Being influenced by her own upbringing, she has always been aware of the role community plays in one's life and its influence on an individual. Community can both save you and forsake you. The nature of black community has been changing, according to Morrison, and so has her view of it. Her writing career reflects these alternations, revealing a significant change in her perspective. Looking at her first novel, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, her third novel written seven years later, Song of Solomon, and her seventh novel, Paradise, written in 1998, this thesis traces the way her position alters throughout the years. Being opposed to both radical separatism and blind assimilation, Morrison first proposed return to traditional African values as the possible cure for the black community destroyed by the forces of capitalist society. Later in her career, however, Morrison changes her ideology and suggests as a remedy a community that does not exclude the unworthy, but is open, caring, and inclusive. By evolving from individualism to individuality, communities that will include everyone can be created.
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Louisiana purchase
Keltošová, Jana ; Opatrný, Josef (advisor) ; Robbins, David Lee (referee)
The main purpose of the thesis is to illustrate a process of gradual development of America's diplomatic relations and skills which consequently led to the Louisiana Purchase. This land acquisition has been effected by a culmination of a series of events on two different continents. Therefore, the Purchase was not an act of signing, but an act which defined the state's existence, recognition, and acceptance by other nations. It is not sufficient to be aware of the events taking place shortly before the Purchase and therefore the paper presents political, diplomatic, industrial, and commercial reasons of England, Spain, and France which gave rise to the United States. The thesis is divided into respective centuries with their most important events and outcomes of the mutual negotiations between the three above mentioned Europeans powers. The moment when the English subjects became independent, later declaration of Independence, and the French Revolution are the examples of important milestones which eventually resulted in the land acquisition. However, it is not correct to think that once the problem of the area is settled, the future steps are a lot easier to take. Only then the issues such as the application of law, subjugation, and later development of the state become very significant and...
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Territory and Deterritorialization in Works of Thomas Pynchon: Space in the Post-Modern Novel
Vaníček, Vít ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Robbins, David Lee (referee) ; Miller, J. Hillis (referee)
Doctoral Dissertation Vít Vaníček, 2012 ABSTRACT The present work takes Thomas Pynchon's work as a whole (oeuvre) in an interpretive literary analysis, arguing that there is a unifying pattern of the use of space in the narratives. This pattern is attested to by the development of tropes, motifs, and themes vested in literary space, literary space as a world of the characters, and spatial discourses informing the characters' epistemology. The present work claims that there is a recognizable common denominator in Pynchon's use of space: the authorial message emphasizing the growing urgency with which the ethical aspect of human being in the world is constitutive to social reality. The methodology of the present work combines interpretive reading based on reader's cooperation with the text and the use of terms from selected philosophical readings. The cooperation with the text is vested in restitutive (or open) interpretation that is delineated by what a text can and does support (Umberto Eco's concept of the text as a "lazy machine") and the concept of the "small world" of narrative (Lubomír Doležel). The philosophical inspiration relies on the tenet that human epistemology of being in the world is contingent on the physical existence in space (Maurice Merleau-Ponty). The work then negotiates Martin...
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Typology as Rhetoric: Reading Jonathan Edwards
Světlíková, Anna ; Procházka, Martin (advisor) ; Fabiny, Tibor (referee) ; Robbins, David Lee (referee)
Anna Světlíková Typology as Rhetoric: Reading Jonathan Edwards Dissertation Abstract This work is a study of selected typological writings of the New England theologian, thinker and preacher Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). Typology is primarily a Christian exegetical practice connecting the Old and the New Testament on the basis of prefigurative analogies. Edwards expands the typological principle to nature and argues that the world and general human experience contain types or images of divine things, that these typological connections are objectively existing and may be discovered by the believer. The dissertation examines the rhetorical aspect of Edwards' natural typology and the rhetorical form of the type in its connections to other tropes, particularly emblem, symbol and allegory. In doing so, it also addresses the issue of the connections of Edwards' texts to Romanticism and seeks to refine existing interpretations of these links. Edwards has been interpreted, in the tradition of Perry Miller, as anticipating Transcendentalism and Romanticism, one of the arguments being precisely that his natural types anticipate Romantic symbol. On a more general level, this work addresses and seeks to overcome some existing methodological limitations in the scholarship on Edwards, who is typically studied from the...
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"Reflections on Religion: Richard Wright and James Baldwin"
Jirásková, Anna ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
The thesis seeks to explore how religion is depicted in the works of two of the most influencial African American authors of the 20th century, Richard Wright and James Baldwin. The analysis takes as framework Wright and Baldwin's mutual discussions about how to properly articulate the African American experience in literature. The thesis examines an autobiographical work and a novel by each author. In Wright's case, the books that are discussed are his two-volume autobiography, which consists of a first part dealing with Wright's childhood and early youth in the American South, called Black Boy, and a second part, American Hunger, recounting his adult life in the North. Furthermore, his major novel Native Son is analyzed. In the case of Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, i.e. two essays which elaborate on different episodes from Baldwin's life, and the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain are examined. The discussion is completed by insights offered by Wright in his essay "How 'Bigger' Was Born", and by Baldwin in the essays "Everybody's Protest Novel", "Many Thousands Gone", and "Alas, Poor Richard!" The first section of the thesis deals with the criticism Baldwin advanced against Wright in several essays, in which Baldwin was suggesting that Wright's angry writings have only reinforced the discourse of the...
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Spiritual anarchy in Emerson: the infinitude of the private man
Žižka - Marušiaková, Jana ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Procházka, Martin (referee)
(EN) Spiritual Anarchy in Emerson: The Infinitude of the Private Man The central focus of the thesis is a critical study of anarchistic ideas vital and alive in the major literary works of R. W. Emerson. Included in the thesis is a general layout of the history and major figures of anarchism as well as its definitions, bearing in mind the fact that anarchy is indeed a broad river with as many diverse streams and currents as there are individuals striving for freedom. I explore the common ground between Emersonian ideas and Eastern mysticism and Greek thought to establish the central anarchistic themes present and their relevance thereof. Throughout the history of human kind individual needs, values and aspirations inevitably clash against the restrictive norms of the society and state. Yet, although the outcries defending freedom have been solitary, its energy and genius have aroused the appraisal of many whose longing for liberation has not been down-trodden with social estrangements; among such was Henry David Thoreau who in turn played out the intelectually and spiritually sophisticated insights of Emerson into the practical experience of everyday living and being. His insistence on a simple and fulfilling life, bereft of materialistic concerns and hindrances, in complete harmony with nature,...
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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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Du Bois and rap music: two ways of awakening of the African American self-consciousness
Sedlák, Ladislav ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to connect W.E.B. Du Bois and rap music as two immensely important influences on African American community by tracing the development from one of the greatest scholars in American history to the widely criticized musical genre. Du Bois is studied all over the world whereas rap lyrics are mostly ignored by scholars. Nevertheless, both can serve as extraordinary sources of knowledge and pride, both can lead to the awakening of African American self-consciousness, as far as we choose the right kind of rap music and the right Du Bois. Du Bois's inclination to Stalinism in his later years may be perceived as equally condemnable as the first album of the American gangsta rap crew NWA; but most importantly both Du Bois's radical political thinking and the emergence of gangsta rap are alerting and inevitable in a way. They were caused by the longstanding frustration of the black community in the US. The thesis compares the themes of Du Bois's collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk with the poetry of rap artists. An important part of this thesis is also a sketch of the development of African American progressive thought and social commentary, which is necessary to see the link between Du Bois and rap. It is also intended to make us see that the artistry of musicians such as Mos Def,...
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