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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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