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Playing Tricks: An analysis of Janice Galloway
Kotalíková, Michaela ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Clark, Colin Steele (referee)
Novels by Scottish author Janice Galloway belong to the most influential works in contemporary Scottish women's writing and her female characters often offer a stunning insight into the minds of women, who are stricken by various forms of emotional or existential distress. The aim of this thesis is to discuss and closely examine the main character Joy Stone in Galloway's most famous novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing, in order to analyse the position of a woman in contemporary Scottish society and underline the importance of work such as this one. The first aspect that attracts attention is its unusual and experimental form apparent from the very first sight by the mere flicking through the book. The text seems to be living its own life, often changing form, breaking down into lists, signs or play-like dialogues, and some words even partly disappear off the pages. This fragmentation is one of the main focuses of the novel and it is expressed in two levels. One of them is the fragmentation of the text which mirrors the second one, the mental breakdown of the main character Joy Stone. This study is going to concentrate on both of these aspects, firstly it will deal with disintegration of the mind of Joy and the world around her, and subsequently it will proceed onto the form of the novel and look...
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Madness of Love, Love and Madness: A survey of the Works of Rose Tremain in the 1980s and 1990s
Koucká, Anna ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Clark, Colin Steele (referee)
Rose Tremain, a contemporary British author born in 1943, belongs among the most talented writers of her generation. Nonetheless, her works are not as successful as she would deserve. The two historical novels that she has written, Restoration and Music and Silence, have brought her a remarkable popularity. As for her other works, however, she has not been given adequate attention. The aim of this thesis is to introduce the reader to some of her novels and characterize her work. A major theme in her prose is the madness of love that she examines basically in all her texts. For the purpose of this thesis, four novels have been chosen as representative of her work: The Swimming Pool Season, Restoration, Sacred Country and Music and Silence. In the search for the meaning of life, Tremain's characters often concentrate on romantic love as the only reason for living. Tremain emphasizes the foolishness of this, showing that romantic relationship itself can never fulfil one's life. The happiness in a fruitful relationship is possible, but one always has to start with one's own personal development in order to achieve it. Tremain points out that we cannot look for self-realization in romantic relationships; otherwise, our sense of inferiority and insufficiency will probably have a catastrophic effect on...
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The Mighty Boosh: theatrical and narrative sspects of Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding's epic comedy
Šímová, Martina ; Christov, Petr (advisor) ; Clark, Colin Steele (referee)
This thesis is concerned with a detailed analysis of the work of the British comedic troupe The Mighty Boosh created by actors and comedians Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding. The Boosh phenomenon is relatively unknown in our cultural environment. Accordingly, the first part of the thesis aims to serve partly as an introduction: it presents the authors' cultural background and the origins of the project itself. Subsequently, technical and physical aspects of the show as well as the acting/theatrical methods used are inquired into. The second part is more practical as it focuses on the narrative framework and strategies, which tend to be highly repetitive and make Barratt and Fielding's project an epic (heroic) comedy. The analysis seeks to explain these narrative strategies by referring to authors such as Vladimir Propp, Joseph Campbell and others, and to reveal The Mighty Boosh in its entirety and complexness.
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City as a fictional character in the postmodernist novel: Alexandria Quartet and The Moor's Last Sigh
Freimannová, Dominika ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Clark, Colin Steele (referee)
in English This Bachelor thesis engages with the topic of a portrayal of the city in the postmodern novel which is then studied on the example of two chosen novels: Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell and The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie. Both novels present the urban space as a female character with a strong influence upon the events and the formation of the protagonist's identity. The second chapter is dedicated to a theoretical framework which helps to establish what we can understand under the term modernist literature and it traces the basic features such a literature possesses. For this framework I adopted the study of postmodernism presented by the work of Linda Hutcheon, mostly her A Poetics of Postmodernism. A special attention is dedicated to the aspects of postmodernism that can be applied on the portrayal of space and the relationship existing between postmodernism and modernism. The third chapter outlines the basic concepts of space established by modernism. The major concepts dealt with in this thesis are: subjectivity, perspective, palimpsest and myth. As follows from the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, these concepts should be traceable also in postmodern fiction in a transformed state. According to Linda Hutcheon, the basic tool of this transformation is...
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Rose Tremain:Historical Novels
Koucká, Anna ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Clark, Colin Steele (referee)
Rose Tremain, a contemporary British author born in 1943, belongs among the most talented writers of her generation. Nonetheless, her works are not as successful as they would deserve. Two historical novels of hers - Music and Silence (1999) and especially Restoration (1989) - have brought her a remarkable popularity, which, however, did not last long. The purpose of this thesis is to make the reader better acquainted with these two texts and examine their literary influences. This thesis focuses mainly on 'historiographic metafiction', a term crucial to understanding Tremain's historical novels. Historiographic metafiction is a postmodern art form, related to the ideas of New Historicism questioning our notion of history. This school of literary theory shows history as a human construct by stressing the fictitiousness of any historical report. It points out that history - the multiple interpretations of past - may be no less fictitious than fiction itself. The decentralization and disorder which are characteristic for historiographic metafiction may be expressed by various literary methods. This thesis concentrates on four of them, typical for Tremain's postmodern historical novels: blending of history and the fantastic, changing discourses, specific narrative strategies and creative anachronisms....
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The world of lost innocence in William Golding's novels
Vomáčková, Lenka ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Clark, Colin Steele (referee)
This thesis focuses on William Golding and his depiction of humanity in his three novels - Lord of the Flies, Pincher Martin and Free Fall. Primarily, I am interested in the way his characters undertake their journey to self-knowledge and thus establish their own identity. This process of self-exploring is then described in terms of innocence, experience, guilt, spirituality and darkness. By scrutinising three levels of these novels - moral, social and religious (mystical) - I am going to establish certain patterns of Golding's philosophy, and thus reconstruct his view of mankind. As a result, I will present Golding as a moralist, sociologist and mystic. Golding himself reveals that he is interested in conveying his message concerning these issues to readers. In his collection of essays called A Moving Target he writes: "We, the storytellers, must produce a more bumbling truth and it has to be sought for in that extended cooperation that must go on between the novelist and his reader."1 Therefore, Golding puts his characters in dangerous, psychologically and physically extreme situations to make them confront their selves and describe their moral, social and religious attitudes. Virginia Tiger remarks on this technique: "A direct confrontation is made to occur between a character's centre (roughly...
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Depiction of media in British dystopian fiction
Bakič, Pavel ; Clark, Colin Steele (advisor) ; Pilný, Ondřej (referee)
The purpose of this thesis was to trace the depiction of media in British dystopian fiction, or rather some of its most prominent landmarks. In its course, however, a need of eclectic approach became apparent, as each novel invited a different framework of interpretation, at least partly: H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes fuses mythological elements with very current exploration of self-definition in the world of freely circulating media images, A. Huxley's Brave New World presents electronic media as dangerous to the proper balance of individual faculties of the human mind, G. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four prophesizes the destruction of an individual by ever-escalating state control of media, made possible by technological progress. A. Moore's and D. Lloyd's V for Vendetta adopts and re-imagines all these concerns in a post-modern, self-reflexive and metatextual manner. A more extensive selection of primary texts could possibly yield a clearer line of the theme's evolution throughout the 20th century, or at least succeeding or competing trends in its treatment, but the current, narrower choice bespeaks the considerable individuality of vision in the represented authors' works, even as they often address similar issues and engage in a dialogue by means of shared motifs and concerns.
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Manipulation of children in the prose of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell
Linhart, Marek ; Clark, Colin Steele (referee) ; Wallace, Clare (advisor)
The focus of this thesis are two of the most prominent specimen of utopian literature, namely George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Despite the fact that Brave New World, which was published in 1932, predates Nineteen Eighty-Four by seventeen years and was written in a quite different social and political climate, both these books share many important elements. While depicting vastly different societies with diverse structures of power distribution, they both express certain fears and worries that their respective authors had about the future of civilisation, which is why they were chosen as primary texts for this thesis. More specifically, the main area of discourse is going to be the treatment of children and their relation to the state as depicted in these books. In this field, both Orwell's Oceania and Huxley's World State share the same objective, which is to turn children and the young generation in general into an obedient tool to be at the system's disposal. This aim is very prominent for many reasons in both books, but the results are the same; children willingly submit themselves fully to the state and become one of the major means the state possesses to achieve its goals. The degree of control over children both in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty- Four is...
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Moral, social and psychological issues in the works of Robert Louis Stevenson
Macura, Michal ; Clark, Colin Steele (referee) ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor)
The works of Robert Louis Stevenson, as widely varied as The Treasure Island, "Markheim" and The Ebb-Tide are deeply immersed in social, psychological and moral issues peculiar not only to the Victorian age but also relevant to our own time. His is the very benign, unpretentious and fatherly view of mankind common to all great thinkers and insightful artists. In his prose he explores the character of human mind with its deformities and incapacities as well as its virtues, for to be true to life is, in Stevenson's own words, much more estimable than to idealize it. An honest critique of social illnesses is worth a great deal more than mere show of goodness, prudence and morality often required by the publishers and expected by the reading public of Victorian era. The present thesis concerns itself both with Stevenson's theoretical concepts and the practice of his writing. It discusses the motivation, realization and reception of the prevalent themes of Stevenson's prose: duality of one's character, internal struggle against social pressure, assumed respectability and criticism of oppressive policies. Along with these, it also deals with the man's need to stay truthful to his nature, a concept Stevenson defends with some energy both in his essays and his work. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
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