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The child and the childhood in the literary working of Božena Němcová
Machková, Klára ; Šmahelová, Hana (advisor) ; Merhaut, Luboš (referee)
This thesis focuses on conception of the child and the childhood in the literary working of Božena Němcová and follows two aims: the occurrence of the theme including her ethnographical works and the determination of significant function of the theme in the prose of Němcová, especially in the pro se Babička. The thesis also deals with the reflection of the childhood in the correspondence cards od Němcová. The next aim of the thesis is to search the moments which evoke remembrances of the reader's childhood.
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The semiotic specifics of the postmodern works of art
Fronková, Markéta ; Šmahelová, Hana (advisor) ; Vojvodík, Josef (referee) ; Málek, Petr (referee)
The concept of "postmodernity" has become widespread at various contemporary fields of science. It seems to be linked to the philosophical area of thinking in the first place, but the transdisciplinal aspect of this notion is more than obvious. The beginning of the postmodern period is, not surprisingly, a topic for numerous discussions. As to the determination of the beginning of postmodernism, this project inclines to a hypothesis of J.-F. Lyotard, who puts an approximate initiation of postmodernism to the end of 1950s. Though, the fact that the situation is not typical for the Czech literature must be taken into an account. The main focus of this project (although it is concerned with approaches of other areas, for example fine arts) is on the field of literary studies, especially on semiotics. It would be quite misleading and restricting to try to make an exact definition of postmodernism in literature. This is the reason, why the project is conceived as an open consideration and a reflection on postmodernism, with a stress on the semiotic point of view. The chief aim of the project is to analyse concrete texts (in some cases also visual works) often "labeled" by critics as "postmodern" and to seek for the specifics they have in common, especially on the level of semiotic structure. The analysis should...
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The Depiction of Gypsies and Its Relationship to "Our" Village in 19th-Century Czech Literature
Soukup, Daniel ; Šmahelová, Hana (advisor) ; Merhaut, Luboš (referee) ; Svatoň, Vladimír (referee)
Mgr. Daniel Soukup The Depiction of Gypsies and Its Relationship to "Our" Village in 19th-Century Czech Literature (abstract) The present study analyzes the "Gypsy" figures in 19th -century Czech literature as non- mimetic creations. A critique of the contrary approach, which sees "Gypsies" as distorted images of actual Romanies, is elaborated in chap. 1.3. The subsequent chapters focus on the concepts of "constructed strangeness", marginality and the numinous (1.4); the diverse cultural layers which make up the Gypsy stereotype (1.5); and the semantics of this stereotype (1.6). This general theoretical overview is followed by interpretations of four literary texts (chap. 1.7-1.10) which represent the archaic (demonizing), the romantic and the modern (ironic) layers of the Gypsy image. The spy Zatrán, a character in Josef Linda's historical drama Jaroslav Šternberg v boji proti Tatarům, can be seen as an example of a demonized Gypsy. Karel Hynek Mácha's novel Cikáni and Adolf Heyduk's lyrical sequence "Cigánské melodie" depict both the romantic desire to identify with the Gypsy and the impossibility to achieve it. Svatopluk Čech's short story "Cikánka" presents an ironic deconstruction of the Gypsy stereotype. The second part of the study contains comprehensive contextual interpretations of Gypsy motifs in...
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History and narration. Palacký's "Dějiny" as a source of historical imagination of nation
Činátl, Kamil ; Šmahelová, Hana (advisor) ; Brabec, Jiří (referee) ; Vašíček, Zdeněk (referee)
This doctoral thesis mainly focuses on the narration of history and its culture creating potential - that is to say, its ability to form imagined communities. Primarily, it deals with the grand historiographic syntheses of national history (Michelet, Palacký, Lelewel etc.) emerging mainly in the 19th century, in which an important part was not played only by enlightenment criticism ad heuristics, but also by the traditional imaginative power of narrative. In the thesis this model of a "new" national historiography is particularly represented by Palacký's Dějiny národu českého v Čechách a na Moravě (The History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia). The detailed narratological analysis of this work, which in many respects was the founding text of the modern Czech historical consciousness, attempts to illuminate to which extent the modern idea of nation was constituted by the historical imagination. Therefore, the analysis does not concentrate only on Palacký's The History, but also on the adjoining "gravitation field" of both historiographic and artistic representations of national history. The narratological point of view is employed also in the analysis of the mutual relations between historiographic narrative and historical fiction (historical novel). In many regards, the obscurity of the...
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Karolina Svetla's works in the discourse of literary critic of the second half of the nineteenth century (ways to read national literature)
Říha, Ivo ; Šmahelová, Hana (advisor) ; Vaněk, Václav (referee) ; Merhaut, Luboš (referee)
The presented thesis interprets works by Karolina Světlá on the background of Czech literary critical discourse in the second half of the nineteenth century. It focuses on the period approaches to the forms and functions of national literature. It is aimed at problems of tasks set on a Czech writer. Karolina Světla's prose raises a question - in what extent such "political order" might have influenced individual writing style. We are interested in the issue of both author's and reader's reflection of patriotic-educational influence on literary output. Such period acceptance of this intention of given kind as a factor that in desirable (but in no manner restricting) way pre-sets the formation of the sense of artwork, is understood as an expression of heritage of early revival idea (belief in a nonsubstitutable power of national literature the task of which is to arouse intellectual life of a nation and to guard its independence and uniqueness is a part of this heritage in the process). It is understood as an expression of movement in myth about a nation raised from the dead - a movement that under the terms of a generally accepted patriotic-educational communication code is shared by both readers and their writer. An answer to the question of how the basic aspects of the discourse of Czech literature then...
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Milota Zdirad Polak's Sublime of Nature
Ibrahim, Robert ; Šmahelová, Hana (advisor) ; Hlobil, Tomáš (referee) ; Hrbata, Zdeněk (referee)
Sublime of Nature (1819), a lyrical poem in six cantos and with more than 1800 lines, written by a Czech poet and Austrian officer Milota Zdirad Polák (1788-1856), was at the time of its birth celebrated as the greatest Czech poem, its author labelled a genius and compared to the greatest European poets of the 18th Century. However, in the following decades Polák was gradually falling into oblivion, with literary historians of the end of the 19th and the beginning of 20th Century viewing Sublime of Nature as an unreadable work and its author as a non-poet. This attitude was also true for the 20th Century. However, in recent years some independent attempts have been made to bring Sublime of Nature back to both wider public and scholarly attention. The following dissertation joins these efforts. The aim of this dissertation is not an evaluation of Polák and his work; it is an attempt at interpretation of the text based on comparison of two versions of the poem (book and periodical) and on literary-historical setting of the work. Although Sublime of Nature appeared during a transient era of Czech literature characterized by its syncretism, this dissertation tries to relate Sublime of Nature to the context of (classicist) poetics and aesthetics of the 18th Century and in case of any borderline phenomena always...
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