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Topophilia and Escapism: W.H.Auden's Interwar Poetics of Place (1927-1938)
Vít, Ladislav ; Mánek, Bohuslav (advisor) ; Sukdolová, Alice (referee) ; Franková, Milada (referee)
This work focuses on Wystan Hugh Auden's (1907-1973) early poetry (1927-1938) and analyzes its engagement with places, landscapes and local cultures. The scope is limited to the interwar years, when Auden started to write poetry, entered the literary stage and formed his ethical stances, poetics and a personal voice within one of the most socially arduous and aesthetically innovative periods of recent history. This turns his 1920s and 1930s work into a fertile ground for research, which is evidenced by the large body of extant criticism scrutinizing the technical aspects of Auden's interwar poetry as well as its reflection of the poet's affinity with Marxism and the politically conscious intelligentsia of his generation. While sharing the same historical focus, this dissertation diverges from existing scholarship and traces the character of Auden's imaginative dynamic, which renders an inscription of the physical world into art. Auden was highly emotionally and intellectually responsive to particular places, environmental types, human spatial experience and their embedment in arts. This work examines his engagement with Alston Moor in the Northern Pennines, Iceland and England. In his prose, the former two are constructed as sacred places and asylums for his imaginative and physical escapism. The...
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J.K.Toole, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Ken Kesey: Authority and Grotesque in the U.S. Literature of The 1960s.
Kocmichová, Linda ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Sukdolová, Alice (referee) ; Olehla, Richard (referee)
The dissertation focuses on the impact of authority and grotesque in the U.S. literature of the 1960s. The key theoretical approaches used for the analysis were: Bakhtinian theory concerning popular carnival culture and Vizenor's theory concerning tricksters, Deleuzian notion of repetition and schizoanalysis and the theory of Foucault concerning power and anti- authority struggles. The main task of the analysis was to trace the common and differentiating features which were demonstrated in the novels in the form of anti-authority struggles and forms of madness, which is viewed as a deliberating force. The authors were chosen for their challenging attitudes toward the forms of power exercised over the American society and for the usage of the grotesque as a tool to convey a subversive message. The analysed authors were John Kennedy Toole and his A Confederacy of Dunces, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and his Slaughterhouse 5 and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
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Concepts of Space in Victorian Novels
Sukdolová, Alice ; Procházka, Martin (advisor) ; Potočňáková, Magdaléna (referee) ; Vránková, Kamila (referee)
The dissertation focuses on two general categories of defining space: on space expression according to the expressive approach to aesthetics and, secondly, on space representation based on the mimetic aesthetics. The exploration of the surface structure of space employs the philosophical categories of smooth and striated space, formulated by Deleuze and Guattari in their Treatise on Nomadology, while the depths of the inner spaces, including the spaces of the human mind, are treated within the framework of Gaston Bachelard's phenomenology, stressing the importance of the symbolic meanings hidden in the unconscious. The primary texts in which the concept of space is explored range from the Brontë sisters' novels (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre) to Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels, and further on to the last novel of George Eliot, Daniel Deronda. Attention is given to the role of natural elements constituting space, with emphasis on the element of water.
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