|
|
Finding America: Issues of Acculturation and Assimilation in the Works of Anzia Yezierska
Jegerová, Dagmar ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
This BA thesis deals with the acculturation and assimilation of East European Jewish immigrant women in the pre-WWI United States, as represented in the selected works of Anzia Yezierska ("Wings," "Hunger," "The Free Vacation House," "The Fat of the Land," "How I Found America," and Bread Givers). The source of the conflict in the texts is the discrepancy between the immigrant ideals of America as the land of their dreams, and the Americanizers' demand for Anglo-conformity. Operating with definitions of assimilation by Robert Park and Arnold Rose, and Milton Gordon's concept of intrinsic and extrinsic cultural traits, this interdisciplinary analysis approaches the conflict on two levels. Firstly, as the clash of the Jewish and American traits, identified in the representatives of each culture. Secondly, as the confrontation of the first and second generation immigrants, whose differing visions of America influenced their attitude towards acculturation and assimilation, determining its efficiency. The thesis debates whether formalized Americanization, as represented in the primary texts, enables complete assimilation on both the intrinsic and extrinsic levels. Since the texts frequently place the Jewish and American traits in polar opposition, the thesis explores whether assimilation, as the...
|
|
|
Jewish Identity of the Third Generation after the Holocaust
Putnová, Karolína ; Grznár, Miroslav (advisor) ; Novotná, Hana (referee)
This thesis "The Jewish identity of the third generation after the Holocaust," deals with the topic of the third generation Jews after the Holocaust. The uniqueness of this generation comes from the fact that the Jewishness of this generation must be rediscovered. The second generation after the holocaust - the parent generation of the young Jews were brought up by the first generation, the generation that completely abandoned the jewishness after the holocaust. There was nobody for the third generation to learn the jewishness from. This thesis investigates how the young people of today in the Diaspora Czech environment become Jews. This thesis concentrates primarily on the young with jewish descent, nonetheless, two of the participants were converts. Moreover, I look at the becoming a Jew through the three dimensions of Jewishness. First the ethnic dimension, based on Jewish origin and the jewish peoplehood. Secondly, the religious dimensions based on the faith in God and third, the cultural dimension. These three dimensions have been taken from contemporary theory. The research was conducted in the beginning of the 2016. As a method I used Grounded theory, to create a new theory, however, I could not aspire due to the small number of respondents. First of all, I wonder how the Jewish identity is...
|
|
|
Jewishness and fascism in works by Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani and Elsa Morante
Baroni, Sarah ; Flemrová, Alice (advisor) ; Čaplyginová, Olga (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to find and analyze thoroughly the elements of Jewishness and fascism in the writings of Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani and Elsa Morante. We chose the key novels of these authors, where the topic of Jewishness and fascism is present most significantly. Then we made an analysis of these writings, we put emphasis on the topics examined by us and subsequently consequently we compared them. At first we described briefly a political-historical context in Italy after the ascension of fascism and during the war years. Afterwards we focused on individual writers who we firstly introduced in short biographical prefaces and after that we chose the representative writings in which we followed up their conception of the topic of Jewishness and fascism. In conclusion of the thesis we made a comparative analysis of the writings analyzed by us, and we found out that each of these authors had a specific attitude to the topic of Jewishness and fascism. Nevertheless, we noticed some analogies and similarities among the individual authors. For reasons of completeness, we mentioned what place the topic of Jewishness and fascism takes in the context of the total literary output of our chosen authors.
|
|
|
The Cultural Space and Memory in the Work of Viktor Fischl
Štychová, Michaela ; Vojvodík, Josef (advisor) ; Špirit, Michael (referee)
The aim of this work is to show, how the collective, or rathert he cultural memory is realized in the work of Viktor Fischl in the term of the Holocaust, in which way is the traumatic experience objected in "remembering" in particular Fischl's books, how the characters deal with this experience. Theoretical framework is mainly based on Aleida and Jan Assmann's essays and studies and Maurice Halbwachs's important and inspiring book Collective memory. The main focus of this paper is based on its practical part in which the author tries to clarify and verify conceptions of cultural memory in literary texts. The emphasis is put on those post-war Fischl's proses which reflect the Holocaust exactly from the perspective of author's time, spatial and also empirical distance. This distance creates a very specific form of remembering and its narration. In the conclusion the findings are summed up and generalized. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
|
|
|
Jewish Condition as Image of Marginalization
Pavlíková, Kristina ; Jamek, Václav (advisor) ; Voldřichová - Beránková, Eva (referee)
The theme of this bachelor thesis is the life and literary work of Jacques de Lacretelle, a French literature figure of the 20th century. Its aim is to expound his extensive work which is nowadays almost forgotten. The thesis focuses mainly on Lacretelle's vision of the Jews as described in his two novels- Silbermann and The return of Silbermann. Based on the detailed analysis the thesis tries to understand the reasons of choosing the Jewish motif for Lacretelle's work and personal connotations in it. Lacretelle's life and work is studied in comparison with a Czech author called Ladislav Fuks. We shortly introduce this writer, main events of his life connected with his literary work and his unique style of writing based on the method of substitute literary themes. This approach is subsequently applied on Lacretelle's writings and gives us a new point of view of them. Also we try to compare the series about Silbermann with Fuks's short-story anthology called Mí černovlasí bratři. At the end we draw a comparison between Lacretelle and Fuks and try to discover resemblances in their lives and works. This enables to understand their motives to choose the Jews as the main characters of their writings, probably connected mainly to their feeling of non-acceptance caused by their homosexuality. Powered by...
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
Language and Reality
Bárta, Ondřej ; Kučera, Jan (advisor) ; Kučera, Rudolf (referee)
This thesis tries to explore how ideologies, namely the national socialism, work. It is based on the presumption that the reality as we experience it, is impacted by the language that we use to describe it. Thus, in accord with the philosophy of Eric Voegelin, it claims that to understand a specific society in its authenticity, it is necessary to examine the means of the language that is used to categorize the world. And it is precisely Voegelins expressions, symbolism and order, that are good instruments to explain the fact that even the nacis created such "reality" that was capable to exclude masses of people from the sphere of moral reciprocity, using a language that refers to a certain view of the world.
|
|
|
Textual Identity in Selected Novels by Philip Roth: Representation, Dissimulation, Creation
Lukeš, David ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Pilný, Ondřej (referee)
The present study seeks to explore the ways in which Jewish identity is discursively deployed in three novels by Jewish-American writer Philip Roth: Portnoy's Complaint (1969), American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain (2000). Calling upon a framework of philosophical approaches to identity structured around the key terms of otherness, performativity and ethics, culled from theoretical writings by Judith Butler, Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Lévinas, the thesis analyses how writing about Jews in America functions as a political act, initially perhaps against the author's will, and engages the terms of "majority" and "minority." The central topos is that of otherness, viewed as inaccessible and irreducible (Lévinas), but endowed by the characters we will apprehend with powerful fictions, both appealing and repulsive, foci of desire and derision. In relation to our Jewish protagonists, white otherness (Chapter 1), black otherness (Chapter 2) and other Jews (Chapter 3) will be unearthed as crucial sites of imaginative investment which inform the creation of their individual Jewish-American selves. These selves are performed in discourse alternately with and against their discursive precedents, underscoring the aspect of performativity that Butler calls citationality and establishing an intricate...
|
|
|
The Representation of Shoah: Children Writing the Holocaust
Vlasáková, Šárka ; Holý, Jiří (advisor) ; Mravcová, Marie (referee)
Aim of this diploma thesis is to compare different forms of narrating of the holocaust through Children's eyes. Pure child's narration has much bigger impact on reader than narration of an adult, enriched with metaphors and attributes. In this way child's point of view extends the ethical dimension of holocaust narration. We will examine the discourse of child's narration in three diaries (The Diary of David Sierakowiak, The Diary of Mary Berg, The Beautiful Days of My Youth by Ana Novac), one Fictional diary (The Unloved. From the Diary of Perla S. by Arnošt Lustig) and a novella (Child of the Shadows by Henryk Grynberg). Children's narrators of the holocaust are characterized by psychological maturity, which contrasts with their official age. On the other hand they reveal childishness, while growing up, because of their unfinished childhood. In those books we will examine changing of the narrators discourse and his depiction of space (ghetto, concentration camp, shelter) and persons (family, friend, Nazis). We will also focus on distinct motives that form these books (e.g.: hunger, guilt, comic, Paradise, game).
|
guest ::
