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Stolen generation in Australia
Valentová, Zuzana ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
The main theme of this thesis is Australia's "Stolen Generation." This term refers to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were removed by force from their families between the years 1909 - 1969. However, these years are only unofficial numbers and it is known that the removals took place even before and after this period. The aim of this policy was to assimilate the Aboriginal people in order to educate them in the British manner. This policy was an act of cruelty and abuse since the children were brought away from their families and put into state institutions or foster care to suppress their culture. The aim of the thesis is to portray the development of the Aboriginal culture; beginning with the situation prior to British colonization and ending with the current situation in Australia. The thesis analyses the situation during the colonization and after it because the process of colonization caused further changes. It demonstrates the inability of the Indigenous people to assimilate to the new lifestyle. After the colonization, the Aborigines were deprived of their land and their traditional culture. The worst policies were the removals of so-called 'half-caste' children from their families, which were nothing less than forcible removals that were done without any permission from their...
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Abstract expressionism and Raymond Roussel in the poetry of John Ashbery
Peková, Olga ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Armand, Louis (referee)
Expressionism and Raymond Roussel in the Poetry of John Ashbery John Ashbery is the epitome of the postmodern poet and he reflects in his writings a variety of influences. These are an inherent part of the understanding and appreciation of his poetry but also informative about his attitude to the literary canon: more precisely, they are testimonies of his attraction to avant-gardes and minor and marginal authors. Two representatives of these have been selected for detailed comparison. The first is the second generation of Abstract Expressionists associated with the 1950s New York School of poetry of which Ashbery became a prominent member. The second is the French obscure proto- surrealist Raymond Roussel. The thesis compares several formal aspects of Ashbery's poetry with their respective techniques with a view to elucidate the workings and attitudes behind Ashbery's singular style. Abstract Expressionists were chosen due to Ashbery's long engagement with visual arts criticism and the already-mentioned fact of their shared milieu of the New York School. The comparison, based on Charles Altieri's 1988 article "John Ashbery and the Challenge of Postmodernism in the Visual Arts," distinguishes two main parallels between the visual and linguistic material: a treatment of language similar to collaging...
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Copy, imitation, forgery as an artistic principle in the novel Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd
Labanczová, Johana ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
In the first chapter a question was posed: whether the original and the derivative represent a classic binary opposition in Chatterton. The wide usage of repetition in the novel was revealed to highlight the textuality (in the sense of Waugh's 'condition of artifice'1), intertextuality and self-intertextuality of Chatterton - in particular through references to other texts, the novel's self-referentiality, but also the applying of the means of visual representation (as it was shown in the third chapter). By showing its dependence on particular artistic and textual representations, repetition calls attention to the fact that for example also history could be considered a textual construct. Going back to the initial discussion of the opposition between the original and the derivative, it should be mentioned, as John Frow states, that it is exactly the metaphor of textuality what has a power to overcome 'the dichotomisation of the real to the symbolic, or the base to the superstructure, or the social to the cultural,'2 or the original to the derivative. The subversiveness of embracing the metaphor of textuality goes beyond the one of a forger, counterfeiter or plagiarist. Their works, as Ruthven puts it, 'exhibit a carnivalesque irreverence towards the sanctity of various conventions designed to limit what is...
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Literary semiotics in the early works of Harry Mathews
Stankovianska, Veronika ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
This thesis is concerned with the early works of American novelist Harry Mathews { in particular the literary semiotics of Mathews' The Sink- ing of the Odradek Stadium. The work also sets out to deal with Mathews' relationship to the avant-garde collective Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litt¶erature Po- tentielle/Workshop for Potential Literature) and the collective's project of formal experimentation. \Potential literature," treated as a function of sign systems, is approached through a comparative analysis of structures and re- lations found in seemingly disconnected branches of mathematics.
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The self versus the other: an exposition of an individual's condition in the technological society based on Anthony Burgess's novels A clockwork orange, M/F and The doctor is sick
Lauer, Martin ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
Based on the overall observations of human nature as presented in Burgess's novels the most accurate assumption seems to be that man is both biologically and culturally determined to live in a community. Seclusion is punished with coerced docility to the conventions of the society, as exhibited in A Clockwork Orange and in M/F, or with total rejection by the society in The Doctor is Sick. Freedom appears to be but an apparent, illusory creation of ideology to give the subject a sense of unlimited possibilities. Everything in the Burgessian world of fiction, even the most apparent manifestations of chaos are governed by some underlying structure, which, however cannot be decoded by the main characters. Burgess presents in his novels the condition of the individual, who is being unceasingly exposed to the pressure of the other and inevitably consents to conform to the social order and reinstates his body as a new entity with new relation to the world and social structures. The system, which originally appears as the hateful agency of the other, is finally constituted in the self. Technology, as an exteriorization of human mind, becomes a medium of this transition and as such offers a threat to the individuality of every human being. The loss of individuality, nevertheless, also marks the loss of plurality,...
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Shapes of writing in modern American poetry and art: Ashbery, Andre, Twombly
Hovorka, Jakub ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Quinn, Justin (referee)
The three artists/poets brought together by this thesis are radically different from one another not only in their vocations but also in their ways of writing and making. It is hard, and perhaps impossible, to unite them on a single plane. John Ashbery is a poet and his poetry as it is here presented in terms of its relation to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art is one of disjunction, disorientation and dislocation, a space where relationships and orders are subjected to destruction and erasure. Carl Andre is a sculptor but also a poet whose works are characterized by repetition of basic materials and words in simple patterns, seemingly renouncing any creative role of the artist, and instead foregrounding the textures and shapes of things and words. Cy Twombly is a painter whose paintings and drawings employ writing and texts visually as shapes that carry meaning by their arrangement on paper or canvas. Unlike Andre and Ashbery, whose poetry is characteristic for materialism and impersonality, for being located in the present, Twomblys works distinguish themselves by classicism, romanticism and symbolism. Nevertheless, as I have tried to show, all three of these artists and poets take words and writing into close proximity of art, they re-conceive the process of writing poetry by analogizing it with...
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Joyce against theory
Vichnar, David ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Procházka, Martin (referee)
This work sets out to map the genealogy of a possible location of "Joyce" and "theory" in the present-day Joyce studies, and, equally important, to think of the meanings of the copulative conjunction and which separates/unites the two. The phenomenon of the contagious "Joyce and…" to be found in a plethora of book-, and even more so, paper-titles is significant in its own right, bespeaking as it does not so much a lack of imagination on the part of the scholarly community, as a central tendency of Joyce's writing, variously described as (all-) inclusiveness. Joyce's writing process, itself based on addition and expansion, produced texts whose semantic reference, more than in the case of any other writer, is extra-textual as much as intertextual, deferring its meaning to the lived experience of a specific historical reality no more than to other texts. This tendency, in turn, solicits a repetition in the response of Joyce's readership (from the project of textual annotation of the earliest to the complex genetic examinations of avant-textes of the contemporary Joycean scholarship), whether of the individual exegete, or- again, to a degree paralleled by no other writer-of a reading group. Joyce's texts, from the floating signifiers of "paralysis," "gnomon," and "simony" in the first paragraph of 'The Sisters'...
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Reflections of the deleuzian "time-image" in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and of Alain Resnais
Konoreva, Evguenia ; Armand, Louis (referee) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor)
During the twentieth century, cinematography matured into an independent and potent form of art. Film as a sequence of images caught in continuity presents a unique tool of capturing time; it allows the viewer to observe the manipulation of temporal and of spatial values, which before was not possible in the arts. Furthermore, the technical and aesthetic conceptualization of cinematography was evolutionarily developing during its short history and, according to Deleuze, saw a major break after Citizen Kane (1941)and most forcefully following the Second World War. This break resulted in the emergence of the so-called 'time-image', which in its essence reveals a radical alienation of the individual in contemporary society, but seeks to establish a new philosophy of space and time in a disorientated post-war world. The present analyses of the films chosen in this project aimed at revealing the new realities created by our two chosen film-makers. These realities echo the complexity and ambiguity of the contemporary individuality; these are the realities of a post-war subjectivity, one that is at one stroke both questioned and fragmented. Both Alain Resnais and Andrei Tarkovsky, whose bodies of work were conditioned by the emergence of a new post-modern consciousness, created a new cinematic style and also...
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(Post)Modern Inferno: Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman between modern and medieval netherworlds
Ruczaj, Maciej ; Pilný, Ondřej (advisor) ; Armand, Louis (referee)
I have discussed earlier Noman's hallucinatory experience of "woodenness" spreading across his whole body - "a dry timber poison killing me" (119). It provides another stage in the consistently allegorical construction of the motif. Noman's moment of enlightenment, the possibility of the discovery of an allegorical meaning, is of course immediately distorted by the fact that Noman is already dead and - if his dwelling-place is hell - there is no possibility of further degradation, he is all "wood" by now. "Woodenness" he correctly associates with death, yet as always he misses the point as it is primarily a "spiritual" death that is signalized here.
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Edward W. Said: postcolonial studies and the politics of literary theory
Machátová, Bibiana ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
I first heard the name of Edward W. Said in a university seminar two years ago. His name was mentioned by one of my American teachers and not many of us knew who Edward Said was. After trying to find out who he was I was amazed that I had never heard about one of the most widely known and controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. I was very surprised that this influential author within the fields of literary theory, post-colonial and cultural studies is so little known within the Czech academic sphere. One of the most striking facts is that as of September 2007, there were only five entries by Said in the Czech National Library!. Similarly, only three of his brief essays were translated into Czech? Thus the purpose of this thesis is to grant appropriate attention to Edward W. Said and present an interpretive overview of his work which is necessary before one can begin to place Said in proper perspectives as the individual whom many have claimed as a centrally important twentieth century figure. It will explore Said's contribution to many disciplines ranging from literary theory and criticism to cultural history to postcolonial studies, as well as the literary, cultural, social, and aesthetic roles he has played as an academic intellectual. It will also attempt to interpret the key moments in...
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