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Representations of the female in the work of Charles Bukowski
Mecner, Michal ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
Women. Coincidentally and yet not coincidentally the title of a Charles Bukowski novel and the main subject of this thesis. Charles Bukowski (1920 - 1994) was a German-born prolific American writer whose poetry and prose revolve about the underground life of Los Angeles. His characters were drunks, hustlers, prostitutes, losers, and social misfits. As inspiration he had countless dead-end factory jobs, love-hate relationships, or afternoons spent in the racetrack. After a hard day's work he cracked open a beer, put on a classical record, and began composing poems until his fingers "began to bleed" from typing or until the police came on account of the neighbors' complaint about his disturbing the peace. Bukowski's work in general is centered around the antithesis of the traditional American dream but to be more precise we should say that Bukowski was largely ignorant of the conventional way of living and the American go-getter ideal. Among the low class which became the most frequent subject of Bukowski's writing there is no such thing as daydreaming and the nights are too wild to be spent on dreaming either. There is simply no place for dreams in the lives of lower classes; there is only the rough reality of life at the bottom of everything. No wonder the author chose "Don't try" as his epitaph, often...
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Representations of the female in the work of Charles Bukowski
Mecner, Michal ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
Women. Coincidentally and yet not coincidentally the title of a Charles Bukowski novel and the main subject of this thesis. Charles Bukowski (1920 - 1994) was a German-born prolific American writer whose poetry and prose revolve about the underground life of Los Angeles. His characters were drunks, hustlers, prostitutes, losers, and social misfits. As inspiration he had countless dead-end factory jobs, love-hate relationships, or afternoons spent in the racetrack. After a hard day's work he cracked open a beer, put on a classical record, and began composing poems until his fingers "began to bleed" from typing or until the police came on account of the neighbors' complaint about his disturbing the peace. Bukowski's work in general is centered around the antithesis of the traditional American dream but to be more precise we should say that Bukowski was largely ignorant of the conventional way of living and the American go-getter ideal. Among the low class which became the most frequent subject of Bukowski's writing there is no such thing as daydreaming and the nights are too wild to be spent on dreaming either. There is simply no place for dreams in the lives of lower classes; there is only the rough reality of life at the bottom of everything. No wonder the author chose "Don't try" as his epitaph, often...
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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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