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Reading Faulkner's Minds
Krtička, Filip ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Arbeit, Marcel (referee) ; Bílek, Petr (referee)
The present dissertation focuses on the work of William Faulkner in relation to the concept of mind as conceived by the second wave cognitive sciences. This concept radically challenges previous notions such as cartesian dualism and physicalism which equates mind with the brain and puts forth the human mind as embodied, embedded in the environment, extended beyond the skin, enacted in a particular situation, and encultured, being both a product and a producer of culture. Such a vision changes the landscape of phenomena that fall under the label "mind" and has implications for the study of minds within literature as well. Literature and narrative art constitute a rich source of insights on the human mind and are treated here as an autonomous discourse on human cognition without necessarily seeking confirmation by the sciences. Since it represents a new discipline among approaches to Faulkner's oeuvre, I discuss cognitive literary studies and their relation to cognitive sciences as well as more traditional literary studies arguing for a cognitive approach to literature guided by the discipline's distinctive methods, goals and object of study. In his works, Faulkner narratively presents human cognition as transcending the boundaries of the skull, being formed by both natural and social spheres, by...
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Telling Community in William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily: A Case Study in Narrative Technique
Krtička, Filip ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Matthews, John Thomas (referee)
This MA thesis provides a close analysis of William Faulkner's most famous short story, "A Rose for Emily." The focus the thesis is motivated by what I take to be the central theme of the short story: community and its functioning. Shifting the focus from the main character to the narrator, I want to "rectify" the perception of the short story which owns its renown largely to its "shocking" or "gothic" aspect. The utilized methodology is chosen with respect to the proposed interpretation. The prism through which the text is approached is narratology. To account for the peculiar narrator of "A Rose for Emily," I use the narratological framework of "collective narrative" ("we narration"). Another important theoretical framework introduced in order to interpret the short story is the interdisciplinary concept of "collective memory." Some sociological conceptions of community are discussed. In the introductory chapter, I mainly discuss the concept of person in narrative and argue against the traditional distinction between first and third person narratives. In the second chapter, I provide an introduction to the technique of collective narrative. The third chapter provides a close reading of "A Rose for Emily" in the context of collective narrative. Firstly, I identify the narrator as essentially...
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"Within un-, sub- or supernatural forces": establishing the world of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead
Krtička, Filip ; Wallace, Clare (advisor) ; Pilný, Ondřej (referee)
The atmosphere of Stoppard's tour de force is one of confusion from the beginning to end. Guildenstern is confused about the outcome of the coin tossing and, thus, about the ruling principle of the world, Rosencrantz is confused about Guildenstern's role-playing practice of questioning Hamlet, everyone is confused about which one of the pair is Rosencrantz and which one is Guildenstern, and they are in turn confused about everyone else. Determinism is confused with absurdity, fate is confused with chance, reality is confused with fiction, and art with life. All this is because of the coin, because of all the duality and duplicity of and in the play. When it is announced at the end that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet, all are dead, the reader or the audience are confused about what they have read and seen. "Clearly, Stoppard is transgressing well-defined literary boundaries, and doing so in such a way that his own characters suffer the consequences of his manipulations."287 Stoppard's drama, a hypertext, is situated at the fringes of texts. He thematizes the textual relationships of Rosencrantz's hypotexts. By doing so, the confusion of his protagonists is brought about by the (con)fusion of texts: "That duplicity of the object, in the sphere of textual relations, can be represented by the old analogy...
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